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.
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.
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.