Mention the words Performance Improvement Plan to an employee, and there’s a fair chance they’ll immediately think:
“They’re trying to get rid of me.” And that’s a real shame.
Somewhere along the way, PIPs have developed a reputation as the beginning of the end. The employee gets called into a meeting, they’re handed a document full of targets, and everyone quietly knows where it’s heading.
But that’s not what a Performance Improvement Plan is supposed to be.
The clue really is in the name; it’s a plan to improve performance.
Over the years I’ve supported businesses and employees through a PIP where that’s exactly what happened. There were genuine concerns about an employee’s performance; we put a proper plan around them, the employee engaged with it and their performance improved, and they stayed with the business. That’s a successful PIP.
We need to stop treating them as an exit strategy
I completely understand why PIPs have developed their reputation.
I’ve seen them used when a manager has already reached the conclusion that they want somebody gone. At that point, the process isn’t really about improvement. It’s about creating enough paperwork to support a decision that’s effectively already been made.
Apart from being really poor management, it misses a huge opportunity.
If you’ve already employed somebody, invested time in training them and they understand your business, surely the first question should be:
Can we get this person performing properly?
Replacing somebody isn’t free, and staff don’t grow on trees…….
There’s advertising, recruitment, interviews, onboarding, training and management time. Then there’s the period while the new person learns the business and becomes fully productive.
Sometimes dismissal will ultimately be the right outcome. But if somebody’s performance can genuinely be turned around, retaining them can be a much better outcome commercially as well as personally.
Sometimes the problem isn’t simply “poor performance”
A recent example of this is a business that had legitimate concerns. The employee wasn’t delivering what was expected, and something needed to change.
But one of the first things I do in these situations is strip away the general statements and opinions.
Managers understandably say things like:
“They’re just not proactive enough.”
“They keep making the same mistakes.”
“They’re not performing.”
The problem is that none of those statements really tells an employee what they’re supposed to do differently.
If I told you that you needed to be “more proactive” from Monday morning, what exactly would you change? I certainly wouldn’t know.
That’s where I started adding structure. We needed to get underneath the frustration and establish what the employee was actually doing or not doing, what the business expected instead and how we could objectively tell whether things were getting better.
Once you’ve done that, the conversation becomes very different.
Instead of “you’re not performing”, you can say:
“This is the standard we need. This is where you currently are. This is the gap and this is what we need to see change.”
That’s something an employee can actually work with.
A PIP needs to give somebody a genuine chance and be supported.
The employee was given clear objectives and understood how those objectives would be measured.
But I also wanted the business to think about its side of the bargain.
If we’re genuinely calling something an improvement plan, what are we doing to help the person improve? That might mean additional training, clearer priorities, coaching, more regular feedback or simply spending more time with their manager.
Sometimes when you dig into poor performance, you discover that the employee hasn’t actually been managed particularly well………..
They may have been allowed to do something incorrectly for months before anyone mentioned it. Perhaps nobody properly explained what good performance looked like. Sometimes two managers have been giving conflicting instructions.
And occasionally there’s something happening personally or medically that the business didn’t know about.
None of that means an employer has to accept poor performance indefinitely.
It simply means we should understand why somebody isn’t performing before deciding they can’t perform. The conversations during a PIP matter more than the form
This is probably the part that gets missed most often. You can have the most beautifully written PIP document in the world, but if the manager doesn’t actually manage the person during the process, it isn’t worth much.
In this case, we didn’t issue the plan and disappear. We reviewed progress, and if something was improving, we acknowledged it.
If something still wasn’t where it needed to be, that was discussed as well.
All feedback is incredibly important.
There should never be a grand reveal at the final PIP meeting where somebody discovers for the first time that they’ve failed. Ta Da!
If they’re halfway through the process and something isn’t working, tell them. Talk about why. Give them the opportunity to correct it while there’s still time.
Equally, tell them when they’re getting something right.
Performance management shouldn’t only be about documenting and evidencing failure.
The outcome of this case study: The PIPs did something that they apparently aren’t supposed to do…The employee improved.
They responded positively to having clearer expectations and regular feedback and the business retained an existing employee with improved skills rather than going through the cost and disruption of replacing them.
More interestingly, the manager came out of the process better equipped to manage performance in future.
That’s why I think we need to flip the way we think about PIPs. This wasn’t a failed attempt to dismiss an employee; it was a successful attempt to improve somebody’s performance. That’s exactly what the process should have been trying to achieve.
Of course, not every PIP ends this way. There will be occasions where somebody doesn’t improve.
You can provide clear expectations, reasonable support, regular feedback and sufficient time and still find that the employee simply cannot or will not reach the required standard.
At that point, the business may need to move further through a capability process, and ultimately dismissal may become an appropriate outcome, but look at the difference in the position you’re then in.
You haven’t simply decided somebody isn’t good enough; you’ve established the required standard, explained the gaps, provided an opportunity to improve, supported them, reviewed progress and made the eventual decision based on what actually happened.
That’s better for the employee and much safer for the business because it means that if somebody challenges the decision later, the employer can explain how and why it reached that decision.
This is where good HR adds value
Anybody can download a PIP template; that’s not really the difficult bit.
The value I add is helping a business work out the actual performance problem, translating management frustration into something objective and measurable, making sure the employee has a genuine opportunity to improve, and helping the manager have conversations they perhaps haven’t felt confident having before.
I’m also there to challenge a manager who tells me an employee isn’t performing; I’m going to ask for examples.
If we’re setting a target, I want to know whether it’s realistic.
If we’re saying there has been no improvement, but previous review notes say there has been improvement, we’re going to address that.
And if the business has already decided the outcome before the process has even started, I’ll challenge that too.
Because HR shouldn’t simply create paperwork to justify the decision somebody wants.
Good HR should help the business reach the right decision.
Sometimes that decision will be that the employment relationship can’t continue.
But sometimes, as happened here, giving somebody clarity, support and proper management is enough to turn things around.
And surely that’s the outcome we should be aiming for first.
Perhaps it’s time to reclaim the PIP, be the business that uses them properly.
I’d like to see Performance Improvement Plans stop being regarded as corporate shorthand for:
“Start looking for another job.”
Used properly, they’re actually a very sensible management tool, they create clarity where there has been frustration. They put structure around expectations. They force managers and employees to have conversations that may have been avoided for too long.
And they give somebody a genuine opportunity to succeed.
This particular employee did.
The business kept them. Their performance improved. The manager became better at managing performance.
That’s not a PIP that failed to get somebody out. That’s a PIP that did its job.
Louise Binning FCIPD
ECL People Solutions Ltd
Making HR Easy for Small Businesses
