At my job we had to fire some guy who just never work, but HR out him on PIP first and assigned him to another team at the company. A few weeks later the new team also wanted him gone, so it was time to fire him. Except HR forgot to tell him he was on PIP so he was only moved to another team yet again. This third team wanted him gone even faster than the previoua.
Yeah. Just to add, it is ostensibly meant to be a way of going “hey, it looks like your performance is suffering. Maybe this is due to workload, stress, etc. problems. Let’s work together to get you back on track”. But of course it is really a sinister way to invent reasons why someone needs to be fired. Because if you get fired after PIP then HR can say “well we tried our best to help you succeed and you just couldn’t do it”
They are a way of gaslighting and victim blaming an employee while firing them.
Or they’re a tool to give the employee some quantifiable and measurable areas they need to improve on. This way both sides are clear of expectations and there’s no surprises.
Not all bosses suck. I’ve had to put a few people on them and they’ve helped, never had to fire someone afterwards.
Nah you just don’t get it. Firing is a capitalist invention designed by the elite to keep the population down. Everyone is an excellent employee and every manager everywhere is getting a bonus and poorly utilizing team skills.
At my previous job I think they actually published stats on pips internally and it was like 50% success rate. I mean it’s not great but the alternative is you just get straight up fired. I think PIP is probably generally a good thing.
That’s certainly a possibility, but if someone told me they were put on a PIP, and asked me what they should expect, I’d tell them that in all likelihood it means that they are going to be let go in the near future.
It’s a different story if the company does regular performance management with all employees. For example I work in the public sector and we do annual performance reviews, but also annual performance agreements, which are basically PIPs but without the prerequisite that performance has diminished.
Well yes. A PIP is a last resort. It’s what you do when coaching, mentoring, and flat out ordering haven’t worked. If you get to this stage you’re at the precipice.
From the employee’s perspective, it’s basically an amount of time for you to find a new job while still on the payroll at your current company. There are exceptions, but generally speaking you either won’t survive the PIP, or you will but you’ll be at the top of the list during the next layoffs. And even if you somehow survive all of that, you’re not looking at good raises and career advancement anymore at that company.
So use it as a runway to the next job and move on.
In my career space, if someones is not immediatly replaceable (even for advanced positions that require degrees) its considered a failure of managment to not have business continuity in place.
You never know when life happens, your lead tech or lab coordinator could have a date with truck-kun and be stuck in the hospital for months. If the important things are not written down then you need to look elsewhere because managment isnt doing their job.
If you were on a PIP, your performance was below expectations for your current level. To be promoted your performance needs to be consistently at the next level.
What kind of company was it that contradicted itself so completely?
Not necessarily. My skill set made me the right choice for the new position. It was more of a job title change than anything.
I do suspect that my boss never submitted the pip to HR, though. He never submitted any of the other ‘disciplinary actions’ he performed over the 7 years I worked for him.
You can offer value while fucking up other things that need correcting. In theory a PIP is meant to clearly highlight a behavior to help the individual correct it. We’ll just fire a person if they don’t really have a chance.
In all the companies I worked at in there last 20 years, there’s simply no way someone can get promoted while on a PIP. Nor can they get a salary increase, bonus, or shares. It’s a strict rule, and common sense frankly.
It doesn’t matter if they exceed some aspects and fail in others. If they’re on a PIP, they are not meeting the expectations for their role, period.
There will always be outliers but the general advice is still solid: if you’re on PIP or something similar, you should start the job search immediately. Coming out in a better position is possible but not likely enough to count on.
In the UK PIP is Personal Independence Payment, which is our disability benefit, which had me really confused, because no fucking way
A. your boss cares enough (or is even able) to get you on it and
B. the Department of Work and Pensions would give anyone PIP for "mere" mental health issues (I have multiple disabilities and am declined every time I have to renew my benefit because their default is simply to decline all applications).
So yeah, "performance improvement plan" makes much more sense lol
You have no control over your work or work environment. You do not understand why things are done the way they are. There is no belonging to anything other than a paycheck and sad trombone pizza parties. You are not growing from your work to reach your potential, or aren’t being actively developed or grown. Your uniqueness is not recognized, you are a serial number.
The great news is, we’ve added menial cost mental health EAP to gaslight you as if any human could succeed in the framework above.
There was this one guy who wrote whole books on this kind of stuff. He called this “alienation” and was trying to warn us about it all the way back in like the 1860s.
You talking about Durkheim and “anomie”? If so, yes the concepts since the beginning of industrialization haven’t changed, unregulated capitalism has only exacerbated the core issues of humans not having evolved to work the way companies want to operate.
HAHAHAHA! I’m listening to it right now on Spotify while posting. Seriously. Amazing song. Posted it to Mastodon yesterday as well as part of my dumb ‘Mycelial DJ’ bullshit.
@cabbagee FYI: if you crosspost something (instead of posting the URL to the post), the source-credit in the OP would have been visible and clicking the thumbnail would have open the image directly.
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