erhui1979/Getty Images
- Performance-improvement plans are often a scary thing for employees.
- Yet when they're set up fairly, PIPs can offer a chance for redemption and growth.
- More managers should be using PIPs — but not as an ultimatum, career experts told BI.
You were just told you're being put on a performance-improvement plan at work.
It's the end, right? Time to update your LinkedIn profile and start applying for jobs ASAP.
In many cases, the answer is yes. Being put on a PIP is often a warning shot from HR that you might soon be fired. Yet if a PIP is structured fairly, it shouldn't automatically be a death blow, career experts told Business Insider.
Some even recommended that PIPs be used by more managers, provided the plans are deployed as they were meant to be used: as a tool to enhance performance or help an employee reset, and not as a last-ditch, 90-day ultimatum.
Jeanne MacDonald, CEO of recruitment process outsourcing at Korn Ferry, the organizational consulting giant, told BI that perhaps 10% of employees should be on a PIP at any one time as a way to help workers deemed less effective. Among those, a good chunk should be expected to come off the plan and return to an employer's good graces.
"Let's say you get half of them off the plan — recovering, doing well," she said. "I think that's what good looks like, right? You're helping people to kind of develop themselves up because people need help."
PIPs shouldn't be a threat, but "a chance to work through the plan. You need to show what they can do. And I love it when someone can turn from a plan," MacDonald said.
She thinks some managers in recent years have waited for layoffs and restructuring plans rather than using PIPs to move out weaker employees. "That's not what people should be doing," MacDonald said. Instead, she said, bosses need to be undertaking the essential and sometimes difficult work of coaching workers who need to beef up their performance.
PIPs can be a good thing
PIPs instill fear, but they're actually a useful tool to help someone grow at work when set up correctly, said Paul Falcone, management consultant and author of "101 Sample Write-Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems." He said he's seen many times over decades working in HR where an employee turns it around, comes off a plan, and ends up a more valuable worker.
Falcone told BI employers should be specific about the things people need to achieve to get off a plan. "As an employer, you are obligated to help your employees succeed. You can't just give them a parking ticket and say, 'Here you go. Do it again and you're fired,'" he said.
Falcone doesn't think employers should target a percentage of their people for improvement plans. He's also not a fan of so called rank and yank — when employers score all workers so the bottom slice can get pushed out.
"When it needs to be done, it needs to get done," Falcone said, referring to cutting workers only when the need arises. "Don't manufacture it."
Rather than looking to have a portion of workers on PIPs, he said, managers need to focus on communicating with workers on how to improve so that when a PIP is necessary, it's not a surprise to anyone.
Ask about your chances of surviving a PIP
Not all PIPs are necessarily well-intentioned efforts to help workers, of course. And even when they are, most employees placed on these plans aren't going to be happy about it. In many cases, workers have said they felt unfairly targeted by PIPs.
Falcone said in situations where trust between workers and their bosses seems to have eroded, a PIP can mean it's time to move on. In some cases, a manager is fed up with a worker and simply wants the person gone. It's hard to bounce back from that, Falcone said.
Workers who aren't sure whether the PIP is simply a penultimate step to getting fired can ask and see what kind of reaction they get.
"If the manager starts looking down at their shoes and they won't meet eye-to-eye and their body language gets all crumply — and they start folding their arms and all this other stuff — you know what? Yeah, they're probably going to say, 'No, this is kind of it,'" Falcone said.
Workers should also submit a written response to the PIP, he said. Doing so can help them document that they won't repeat a certain behavior that got them into trouble or it can let them tell their side of the story.
PIPs should be a last resort, Danna Greenberg, a professor of organizational behavior at Babson College, told BI.
"None of us ever do our jobs perfectly," she said. "Managers need to get comfortable continually giving feedback and catching people when they're doing great work and coaching them to develop their areas of weakness. And if you're doing that regularly, performance-improvement plans should ultimately be for the employee who really maybe isn't well suited for their job."
Falcone said a good PIP, used judiciously, can help both sides.
"By making sure that the employee understands what the problem is, you show that as an employer you're willing to help. They usually will turn things around. It's a good way to salvage employees," he said. "It's not just a way of documenting people out of a company."