Performance improvement plans are on the rise
wsj.com
wsj.com
In my own role, I’ve realized that getting promoted is more likely to put me in competition with a more elite set of engineers, so I continue to decline the promotion offer. I happily perform at top of band in my current role, and avoid the PIP stress. I’m likely sacrificing $100k/year for this peace of mind, but also expect to work another 7 years in this role at this level, as opposed to maybe 3 years at the higher level before getting PIPed.
And more importantly, not the ones you want to model your team after.
There are 1000’s of accounts where these solutions architects would be better than the existing architects. Instead of sending them down into the minor leagues, we are firing them. Seems short sighted, and a waste of talent.
Yet twice I received none. But was put on harder expectations for bonuses.
Hope to be never promoted again!
One of my current mentees got put on a PIP a couple years ago, and she likewise has significantly improved. (She also survived a round of layoffs a year later, which should speak to that)
So while PIPs might be started with the expectation that most employees won't improve, I think they're also started with the hope that they will.
That said, I agree with the general sentiment that much more often than not the employer is not acting in good faith. Over the decades I've seen way too many colleagues get put on a PIP, I tell them to work hard because it can get better, and then they get let go anyways.
Not sure what I'd do today if it happened to me. Probably a bit of both. Take it for the feedback that it is & try to improve my flaws. And also start looking around for a new employer, knowing the reality of the situation.
100% ghosted by my Director. Weekly 1:1s? He no-shows 2 of them. Near zero input. In "fairness", I knew what was happening, but had some tiny semblance of good faith. Hah.
Final meeting, he shows up with HR. "So we've been talking about (when?) and I have just completed my final review of the documents you created (bear in mind these have had significant input from multiple stakeholders who, not for nothing, generally approved), and I am still left believing that your output is not up to the quality or depth that we expect from our PMs, so..."
I pulled up the receipts, because why not? I think he may not even have known that GDocs provides good metrics on documents, including who has viewed, and when, and how many times. I did this with the HR person sitting awkwardly there. "You reviewed this document? GDocs says you've never accessed it. And this one? Never accessed. What about this deck? Never accessed."
At that point he turned his cam off and clumsily handed it over to the HR person. They asked if I'd like to follow up, but that the company would support the Director's decision. Fine, didn't expect any different. They did acknowledge that they could see too that he hadn't done anything to even present a token perspective that the PIP was anything other than firing with 30 days notice.
Lives and learns, we do.
My understanding is the PIPs are to provide proof of "low performance" and that "low performance" can be used as an excuse for the company to not pay out unemployment insurance.
1: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/7378739 (ctrl-f "limit")
Someone I know got put on a PIP solely because the dictates from Upper Management said that annual review scores must have a certain distribution and average per team - and that naturally means someone it at the bottom. And the dictated numbers means that people with lower scores must be put on a PIP. It happened to be the newest, least experienced member of our team, and the PIP "plan" itself (as written by the team lead) was effectively "Continue what you're doing", but they were still forced by HR to do it.
They left themselves a year later, and I don't blame them. They just re-introduced all the worst parts of "stack ranking" and firing the "worst" person in the team with more bureaucracy.
I've seen it both ways and I think it comes down to the quality of the company and the manager - which, of course, varies widely. A good manager doesn't need PIPs because they're always communicating clearly and consistently to their reports about how they're doing. Ultimately, PIPs exist due to concerns about legal claims for wrongful dismissal which can be hard to defend if there's no clear paper trail of documentation.
As expected, a management process mandated by HR and legal concerns instead of just modeling on what great natural managers do is going to be hit or miss and sometimes go horribly awry.
I'm not sure this is true. I'm definitely open to the idea that I was a bad manager or there were things I wasn't doing well, but not communicating my expectations clearly is not something I've ever been accused of. Or at least not once I had some experience. Management comes with a learning curve.
I have had an employee where I and their direct manager were very much communicating they weren't meeting expectations, including coaching and providing warning that their job was now at risk, that only did a 180 when put on a PIP. I think for some people there is power in putting a concrete date on things vs something that needs fixed "soon".
The employee in question continued to improve post-PIP and got promoted. I don't know what happened after I left the company, but I have no reason to doubt they continued to do well.
More generally, a good manager is someone who shields their people from surprises. A PIP should never come as a surprise to someone. Unfortunately, there are bad managers out there who fail at that. It's not the manager's fault if someone gets put on a PIP, but it's absolutely 100% their failing if it comes out of the blue.
From the view of “is this good for the company?” the manager should push back on bogus bad faith tasks and the structures which make them exist.
I understand that from the manager’s own perspective their income might be priority one - but then I wonder if they are just a conduit for senior management crap to flow through, harming their team morale, what are they actually doing that’s worthwhile?
If it is bogus, hopefully it still won’t be out of the blue - warning to the team that it’s coming to someone - and they could try and arrange it as an encouragement to leave, with payout, with recommendation, before it’s a total surprise. The manager must know whom they would and would not fake-PIP, and from Yossi Kreinin’s assertions that employees know their managers’ minds better than they say, the employees likely know who is in favour and who isn’t.
https://www.yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-m...
I have to expect the response would be either (a) threatening to fire me or (b) threatening to force my boss to make the decision with less knowledge of each of my reports' performance. In either case, though, those aren't my decisions to make and I can only take control of whether or not I'm willing to PIP reports that I don't think deserve it.
So unfortunately, this means when an EM creates a PIP, to prevent Yo-Yoing, they need you to leave.
Also, there is an unofficial "pre-pip" phase, where the EM tries to correct these issues. Pips are the nuclear option that cost the EM a lot of time with almost no career benefits.
From the perspective of the company, the company is almost never at fault.
That said I've seen in sales a person only deliver above average when on PIP, passed the PIP and immediately mentally check out then PIP again and deliver. It was pretty maddening for his boss, the person was obviously skilled/capable but just needed PIP to be motivated to actually work
Essentially, you statistically won the lottery.
The probabilistic advice to anyone who gets a PIP is to do the absolute bare minimum at your job and focus all your time and effort on acquiring your next one.
I've seen that once, most recently.
Before that, it was somebody who was trying to get let go on performance grounds, thinking that it would lead to severance (didn't work out).
Before that, it was somebody who got put on PIP, but I'm not sure why, and they were personally devastated and then quit.
Telling somebody that they're fucking up and that they need to improve is one thing, that's just feedback. Creating a structure that's officially "if you don't do X, Y, Z, then you're fired"... just fire them.
I'm sure lots bad managers get away with bad stuff, even when a pip process is in place.
But every bit of documentation produced by a pip could certainly backfire on a bad manager.
Again obviously, not all bad managers will be stopped, not will all bad employees :)
Legal ass covering--especially if the employee is a minority.
I'd like to be snide about this, but the problem is that there really are an amazing amount of shitty companies out there and forcing at least some documentation is likely a good thing, in general.
In my experience it's management telling the employee they're fucking up when in reality it was management fucking up the whole time. Unrealistic schedules, untenable goals, poor/no feedback or guidance, or just actively burning the employee out. Management then uses the PIP to fire the employee without a lawsuit.
There's never a good faith position of management with PIPs. They're for their benefit and never the employee's benefit.
Oh, and if you're hoping to "get justice", or fight, somehow, don't even think about it. The "justice system", by design, is in accessible. And nobody else is bothered to see justice delivered. See also: Pyrrhic Victory.
The first and last time I was put on a PIP I went into early retirement the next day. In doing so, I caught the VP Eng who did the PIP completely flat footed. It turns out they did the PIP against the advice of their boss, the CTO. Egg all over the VP's face. The VP got canned 6 months after that and had to scramble to find another job while I was at the beach.
But congrats on your early retirement and incidental revenge, I guess?
Never been PIP'd myself, but I would prefer it than being fired without warning.
I don't hold any expectations from my employer other than being an employer. Being hired is as much part of a job as quitting or being fired.
All that said, I don't care what reason an employer has to wanting me out. It really does not matter to me. All I need is time to plan ahead so I come out unscathed. Who knows? I may even find a better job on my way out.
The choice is one or both...
It was a huge mistake.
Turns out when all other options are exhausted, a PIP can be a form of respect. In the hands of the right manager, an underperformer gets one last clear chance to show they can do the job. If they succeed, some the ugly baggage gets put behind them. And if they can't succeed, then the PIP sends a message that they are unsuited for the job at the company, and maybe even at the industry at large.
The alternative to PIP'ing an incompetent (not just an underperformer) is micromanagement. That comes with pretense, hostility, and disrespect to their person for an indefinite period of time.
PIP also doesn't prevent someone from getting severance, firing is firing.
2. People, even lousy workers, talk. Treating people with respect on their way out may decrease the person’s negativity/bitterness. Consider it a marketing expense.
3. Severance packages come with legal releases attached, at least in the US. Less risk of lawsuits, frivolous or otherwise.
The length of employment is the most important part of the equation.
In good faith, the process makes sense, right? "You are not performing, you have been told if you do not change it will be a problem, you have not changed, this is formal notice you must change or you will be fired."
In bad faith, as others have described around this thread, it's just a performance around legal departments being risk-averse when most places in the US are at-will and you could fire them with 0 notice, so they're making a paper trail out of whole cloth with the outcome predetermined, so attempting to "work harder" to get out of it is just you giving a lot of effort when you're about to need to work really hard to find another job no matter what.
Tech still, to this day, has a problem retaining women and URMs. Conceptions of individual performance are often shaped by unintentional (or intentional) sexism and racism. Speaking personally, at my last role at FB there was a quite marked change in how I was treated after I transitioned to ~female.
The PIP process does not interrogate all this nearly as much as it should. I'm quite convinced it's absolutely the wrong way to go about things — too much falls on the IC and not enough on management.
Sometimes, you can tell someone "listen, nothing else worked, and we tried for a while, so this is the last resort". Do you think it's better to fire people outright than to give them one last chance?
(There are certainly some individuals that end up being a negative to the team, disrupting more than contributing, and a small minority of PIPs are justified in that sense. But most PIPs I've seen are handed out to hardworking individuals who are very clearly doing their best and are enhancing the team, just because they maybe aren't as good as playing politics, or are game theoretic doves in an environment full of hawks.)
edit: while I was not put on a PIP, at FB I got a "meets most" rating in the cycle where I first built cargo-nextest. In the end nextest had a far greater impact on the world than anything else management was doing, and the same people who gave me that rating now have it as a critical dependency. It's still wild to me how little focus there was on seriously thinking about long-term project health.
Are we building something for the next 6-12 months, or are we aiming to build a monument that will outlast our careers? Sometimes the answer really is the former, but it has very serious costs that are often unaccounted for.
Some environments just can’t be fixed. The employer’s needs and the employee’s have diverged (or potentially were never aligned to begin with).
As a manager, I think I see this most often when a relatively average performer reaches a particular stage in their career and feels like it’s time for them to “take the next step”, but there’s no room for them at the next echelon because the few spots there are going to better qualified or better performing employees.
These folks start to disengage, performance dips, focus is lost. You can’t nurture your way out of this situation. Most employees quit at this stage, but some stick around long enough to be a problem. Most of these people also have a view of themselves which reflects what they were able to achieve at their peak, and blame their current performance on being “demotivated”.
In my experience, very, very few PIPs are handed out to folks who are actually, currently working hard, and in those cases, it’s because that person was never a good fit and should not have been hired in the first place.
PIPs will almost always end in termination because good managers will have already tried a multitude of tactics to improve performance, and bad managers are unlikely to be able to provide the kind of feedback needed to be successful in a PIP if they were not able to before the PIP. In those situations where a good manager is successful with a PIP, there is likely still an issue, because it took threatening the employee’s job to get them to fix their performance, when presumably they did not respond to less formal methods.
I'm an upper-caste south Asian and it's fair to say that I have it much better than, say, Black people in tech on account of race. (Interestingly, I did have a fairly racist interaction once where this guy treated me like I had no idea what I was talking about, even though I'd spent several years working on $subject. From talking to Black folks my understanding is that it's the sort of thing they face all the time.)
Gender adds another layer to all this -- as someone who has been on both sides of that divide the difference has been quite noticeable. And the interaction of gender and race is all the more complicated -- Indian women face a level of scrutiny that neither Indian men nor white women do. And Indian trans women even more than Indian cis women. "Intersectionality" is a really nice term that captures this general idea.
It's a complicated set of interactions, but it's nonetheless real and worth carefully considering. Life's complicated and ambiguous.
Performance feedback should not come in the form of cues. If it does, it is poor management.
There are a million examples of why they are bad, and I can’t really think of any in which they are useful on their own. Which becomes the issue when decision makers advance in ranks and “I don’t dare make decisions without covering my ass” managers slip in. Or when HR gets too much political power and push their tools as the law. Often organisations simply grow into poor cultures because the systemic value of measurements is shit compared to individual management. This is of course helped along by bad managers, who when given too much freedom create an organisational culture which is far worse than the meritocracy of data driven management.
I think it’s a little rough to judge someone who may have grown up in these cultures as a bad manager from a couple of lines of text.
I think the GP is overly optimistic about a PIP. In general I'll say when I've put someone on a PIP, it's been with the expectation of firing at the end. "We have discussed this problem and I've made it clear you need to improve, this is your last chance, I need to see x, y, and z (where X Y and Z are as concrete and measurable as possible) or mm/dd will be your last day". It's making clear that whatever issues are involved have come to a head, and this is the final chance to fix them. My general assumption is that if spelling out the issues and providing coaching hasn't resolved the issue the PIP probably won't either, but I do see value in a clear process vs the cut just being whenever I decide to do it, with no warning that day is coming.
I have also actually seen this work in practice. I've had people who multiple conversations and coaching seemed to make no inroads, but putting that clear "if this isn't resolved by X day, we're done" expectation out there seemed to make it "real" and they've completely turned things around. I have promoted people I've previously put on a PIP.
That said my advice remains, if your put on a PIP it's time to start looking. I think many (most?) managers d use them cynically where a PIP is more paper trail than final warning, and the employee may be getting fired regardless. Even if that's not the case you've just been told very clearly it's not working. Something isn't working and it's better to hedge your bets and look for another job that fits better while trying to improve.
You can tell someone they need to improve their performance. You can help them make a plan. And you can help evaluate the result.
Making a plan can certainly help.
You don't need to involve HR inorder to make a plan.
(Not saying that pip isn't a good concept, just that a formal pip is a last resort kind of tool)
I agree the ideal manager who is a good communicator with a genuinely incompetent employee ought to make a soft touch. If they're really bad, ideally let them know they can look for a job if they wish, offer a neutral recommendation, etc. Let them know a PIP might be coming etc since legal basis must be covered.
Problem with a poor manager, even with a soft touch, is maybe their expectations actually are bad (especially a pointy haired boss who doesn't have a conception of the labor needed). Maybe they have OCD and see all work as bad, in the same way someone might consider Scarlett Johansen extremely ugly because of that one single freckle ruining the whole thing. I've seen this too. That's all to say if a manager comes in with the sweetest gentlest informal approach and complains to Scarlett Johansen about how awful the freckle is, well, even the soft touch won't help much there.
I would imagine in most real world cases we can see both, and we can see mixes, where it's a so-so employee who might be great under a strong manager, but is weaker under a OCD manager who puts the magnifying glass on the weaknesses. And of course sometimes managers will put the magnifying glass on the weaknesses because they want to eliminate this employee for various external reasons.
To some, it is, and to others, it isn't.
I wonder: Is your question a byproduct of some type of educational system which had a lot of grade inflation and people get passed on to the next year no matter how poor their progress?
In my school/high school, if you got an F in one subject, you'd be held back for the whole year. In my university, they didn't grade on a curve, and had clearly delineated thresholds for A, B, C, etc. The engineering department worked hard to ensure only competent people could get an A or B (you didn't need to be brilliant - merely competent).
By the time you get a job, you should be able to handle feedback along the lines of "You're performance is not good enough for this job". With good management, this isn't a shock, and you should have gotten messaging about performance for quite a while prior to being handed a PIP. Not all management is good, though.
It should not be an identity crisis. No one is good enough for any job, and for any team. You should not go on in life thinking you'll not fail. You won't grow much that way.
I've seen management at times give the employee a ton of leeway. A friend of mine was in a SW team, and he decided he didn't like coding. The manager worked with him to give him an alternate role that was mostly related to customer support. When they'd come with a bug report or query, he'd study the (large) code base and help them if they were doing something wrong, or file a proper bug report with the team.
He still sucked (and knew it). He started working reduced hours (with the manager's approval) to handle the stress.
I kept telling him to go find another job if this one doesn't suit him. He had other skills - he'd done HW work professionally at the same company prior to switching to SW.
This went on for two years before they finally put him on a PIP and fired him. He had a grace period of two years to find another job, but didn't.
The real problem is the unfair PIP - where they want to fire you for reasons other than your performance. It begins with escalating demands that you cannot fulfill, and they use that as a pretext to put you on a PIP.
Anti-disclaimer: I've been on a (very unfair) PIP and was practically fired. Everyone I know at the company who's been on a PIP was fired. So when I say all of the above, trust me, I know the dark side of PIPs. I think they are primarily a tool to get rid of person and the manager is usually not honestly trying to redeem the person.
But even in those cases, it shouldn't be even close to "soul destroying". It's simply the equivalent of getting dumped by a boy/girl friend. Sucks, but it's expected. You move on.
Maybe you should consider giving people feedback in non-PIP form!
I will also mention talk of managers getting PIPped, she reports that indeed her manager got PIPed by the director above.
For most companies the purpose of a PIP is to fire a person.
So people's experience will fall into a few categories: * People who are not doing well * People where the expectations of the job are (honestly) different between employee and employer. * Trying to create cause to fire an employee / avoid layoff news.
As an analogy, we don't need a study to figure out that Apple has more of a profit motivation to remove charging bricks from its iPhone packaging rather than their stated motivation to help the environment. We know intuitively as intelligent humans that obviously the cost savings is the most compelling motivation. There is no financial reason for Apple to care about the impact of excess charging bricks on the environment unless it was so catastrophic that it would impact their future business. And I think we all know that it isn't - a charging brick is a tiny collection of common materials that pales in comparison to the amount of gasoline the average person burns in a single day.
In the same way, we can figure out quite easily with our own brains and observation skills that a corporation doesn't have any real motivation for an enployee to successfully exit a PIP. Here's why:
- Firing the employee will directly save on cost and cut risk. Because they are already under-performing there is very little upside to keeping them around, the implication is that they are already costing more than they are bringing in, i.e., they aren't helping very much to ease the capacity burden on other employees or "keep the lights on." e.g., if you have an employee on an on-call rotation who misses their pages or can't resolve any issues without asking for help, you might as well not have them on the rotation at all.
- The employee is already proven to be a below-median performer if not a bottom 25% performer, so intuitively we know that a random hire is more likely to perform better than the current one. If you already have a bad apple you're going to be willing to reach into the bag of apples to find a better one even if you're blindfolded.
- There is no direct cost to firing an employee in the USA. Hiring and firing is at-will and job mobility is high. There is no requirement to pay severance of provide extended notice.
- It will take a minimal amount of time to hire someone thanks to the at-will nature of US labor laws, and because the existing employee is a low performer, a new employee will be very likely to be onboarded to a higher level of performance of the current employee relatively quickly. We already know from data [1] that it only takes a month to hire on average. That's only two paychecks of paying a poorly performing employee. The company could even start the interview process in parallel with the PIP.
- The probability of management being able to turn around the situation permanently should be assumed to be low because fundamentally the role and responsibilities will not change. We intuitively and through real studies know that it’s difficult to change habits and abilities in the sort of time range that a PIP demands. E.g., Is it better to hope that Bronny James one day becomes as good his father at basketball or would it be better to draft someone who is already better than Bronny James? It’s not impossible that Bronny develops to that level but it’s also extremely unlikely and his ceiling is probably only a somewhat small percentage higher than his current level of performance. If you’re giving someone a PIP because they can need help figuring out how to set an environment variable how can you expect them to perform the role adequately even if they put an honest effort into improving?
- There is a clear and direct benefit to the company for having a PIP as documentation of both poor performance and formal notification to avoid wrongful termination lawsuits and to avoid the negative impacts of having more unemployment insurance claims. Paying a few months of salary to document poor performance is clearly worth the cost compared to just a small handful of hours worth of legal fees or a settlement.
I think that all these factors means that effective PIPs are really only going to occur in situations where there is a temporary or sudden decline in performance and that remedies in the PIP will actually help the employee get out of that rut. But intuitively we know that is going to be rather uncommon, because most PIPs are accompanied with additional burden on the employee, so only the people who respond positively to additional responsibilities, pressure, and scrutiny will survive it. And that already is proven to be unlikely because of how the employee ended up getting a PIP in the first place.
[1] https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/time-to-...
You don't PIP a lower performing staff unless they're completely useless or toxic to the environment, you just find tasks that suit them better. At least in my experience managing staff.
Maybe this is part of the problem -- that it's called one thing (a plan to improve performance) but is used as another (legalese once you've already given up hope).
But I've never quite understood why. I imagine if I was a manager people would know if they are doing 20% as much as the best team member and would either be off the team or have shaped up within 6 months. That period where you genuinely are making sure that somebody understands you think they aren't doing well and clarify expectations seems valuable and ideally would happen long before it's too late.
because "completely useless or toxic"(from prev comment) is manager's subjective assessment, and company wants to have stronger metric for firing people.
* clear deliveries which are evaluated by not manager
* collect peers feedback/ratings not visible to manager
This structure can give much stronger metric compared to personal manager feedback.
It sure doesn't feel that way to me, as someone who has seen lower-performing (I'd hesitate to label them under-performing, these people simply never should've been hired into the role they were put into in the first place, but those are anecdotes for another time) be PIPed and ultimately let go, because all it means is my own workload is going to go from fucked to even-more-fucked.
This assumes management is competent and well intentioned.
PIPs can be used for more nefarious reasons, like firing a good employee you don't get along with if you need to convince upper management. Set unrealistic goals then fire them for not meeting them.
I was not at all surprised at receiving it, despite my performance being roughly on par with my entire tenure in that position up to that point. If anything, I was happy to receive it as it prompted me to start interviewing elsewhere earlier.
That's mostly bullshit. The real purpose of a PIP is just to bolster documentation on the employer side to fend off any wrongful termination lawsuits. It probably has a side effect of looking more consistent, but that isn't the purpose.
One thing that does favor the employee is that legal and HR sometimes get carried away with how much documentation is needed. So it ends up taking longer than the employer really wants. But if the employee understands the true purpose of the PIP it gives them plenty of time to job search.
"There was a process, EmployeeA didn't improve." rather than "EmployeeA was suddenly terminated yesterday"
On my first meeting with someone in HR about it, they exclaimed in surprise "Wow, they really want to keep you. Usually when I'm talking to someone, it's because their manager wants them gone."
(I was not, ultimately, let go at the end of that process.)
The kind of professional stoicism being advocated for actually makes you easy to mistreat. I feel so bad for my Gen X coworkers who seem to be conditioned that this is the only way to be and seem to have no concept of when they deserve better.
PIP doesn't always work, but it works wonders with some personalities.
PIP = "Paid Interview Period"
I've never seen anyone recover from a PIP.
i.e. "Maybe if we spook them, we can get the work of two people out of them for a while."
Oops now you gotta hire a new one.
I think that the “believe in the PIP process” is a very typical US thing, driven in part by their labor laws, that is culturally very different in other places, I’ll say EU because it’s what I know best and that is culturally much more adverse to firing
The "oh, I totally deserved my PIP, so all PIPs must be fair" stories assume that all corporate actions are taken in good faith.
If only.
The company needs to prove a gross negligence level of employee conduct to deny unemployment. Things like not showing up to work or workplace sabotage.
So, somewhat counterintuitively, at-will employment in the United States(especially in states like California) is not actually at-will in a practical sense do to the threat of discrimination lawsuits.
Yeah, it did look like the die was already cast, they just wanted perhaps a lawsuit-proof way of showing them the door.
I imagine he'd have flourished if work-from-home had been a thing then.
Bunch of people who took the ZIRP startup decade and assumed it was a permanent thing to not actually have to do work to keep your job.
Note that the PIP alone does not suffice as valid supporting data if the employee contests it. It helps for there to be more data than it.