I get the logic, but as an American I was surprised… I was never PiPed but I too would have assumed it was better than the alternative. Not always!

We implemented a coaching system for our support team about a year ago with the explicit purpose that individual coaching does not directly affect KPI, and that as much coaching can and should be done freely without worry of impacting the support team. The system tracks both the person being coached and their team lead who does the coaching. The coaching is directed to be as instructive as possible, that it's not about punishment, but better ways of handling specific technical situations or adherence to the support policy.

Long term reviews consider not just the person being coached, but also the leader as well, as a high number of coaching options across multiple persons on the same team would suggest an issue with the leadership as the root cause, and more qualitative reviews focus on that element as well. The entire point is to ensure that Performance Improvement Plans don't have to be a thing, and that there is constructive feedback flowing into the system.

Adoption was slow, but with strict adherence to what a coaching instruction must include, we've seen exceptionally high improvement and much calmer conversations when mistakes are made since the support persons realize "this isn't a KPI penalty or a PIP; it's just trying to prevent that." Having the system "open", i.e., the support persons can see every entry they have at any time with a few clicks of a button means no secrets.

It's a lot of documenting, but so far we're seeing a ton of success with it and positive feedback to having this process for constructive criticism, and the focus on also considering "this might be a leadership issue" also helps add some comfort.

I have had very close interactions (details below) with managers who completely fabricated “poor performance” in order to PIP the target out of a job.

In both cases, I had the PIP target secretly work in tandem with a star employee to produce work that was considered top notch work up and down the management chain.

In both cases, the manager took a cursory look at the work and completely dressed down the PIP target verbally and in writing with little or no constructive feedback.

One manager was fired, and the other manager was out to pasture to work on meaningless solo projects (necessary due to organizational reasons).

I am not sure how common this is, but managers who are slightly more intelligent about it can fairly easily set up a PIP target to fail while technically providing constructive feedback.

One of the cultural problems in this org was that pretty much 100% of the managers were bad/inexperienced/untrained, so the unwritten rule was to not monitor the administrative actions of other managers. I was brought in basically to protect them from potential lawsuits that would have had merit — they were incapable of doing this internally.

> I think the point is, if a company is going to abuse employee, that will happen with or with out a PIP

Agreed.

> but even with abusive management having that process IMO is better than not

Sort of, imho. What I always tell people is that they should consider their PIP period as a type of severance and look for another job aggressively while they are on it.

In the handful of orgs that do PIPs well, the folks will usually know that the process is not punitive. I will add that I am fairly certain they every relatively large org I’ve known that does PIPs well also gives folks an opportunity to transfer if the job is not a good fit (assuming the target is not a bad apple, which is a selection problem).

Anyway, I agree that PIPs could and should be an effective tool for remediation. That said, I am not sure it’s any better than undocumented managerial capriciousness and malfeasance since usually all it really does in these situations is slow down the bad behavior slightly.

If anyone gets randomly fired by a bad manager in an org with no PIP, they are probably better off just being out of the org in general rather than suffering for a few months in a sham.