Businesses are challenging to run; there’s no doubt about that. That’s why a Performance Improvement Plan is so important in your business plan.

The hardest thing to do is to find trustable, proactive, and independent workers that can pull things off and help your business grow. If you have worked in your company for a while, you’ll notice that new hires have all the strength and will do their tasks correctly.

However, as soon as they are settled, you notice they are more open to failure. How can you avoid this from happening?

You could start firing everyone who is not doing their job or reprimand them.

But that won’t cut off the issue. It will just prolong it over time. What you need to do is use a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) to address all failures from a specific worker, and help them avoid making the same mistakes again.

This article will cover everything related to PIPs and what you can do to apply them to your company.

The Performance Improvement Plan – A.K.A. PIP – is a formal document that businesses and H.R. staff give to employees that are underperforming in their tasks. 

The file addresses factors that are considered failures in their performance, so they have an opportunity to fix them before the company makes a termination or transfer decision.

The improvement plan also explains to struggling employees what objectives and behavior they need to follow if they want to apply for a new position.

Who Submits An Employee Improvement Plan?

The one in charge of starting a PIP process is the managing director or direct superior. They will submit it to H.R. If the personal improvement plan is approved, the employee should receive it.

It will explain the performance issues seen during the past few months and what they should do to meet expectations.

How Long Should The Improvement Plan Last?

The entire performance improvement plan process should last based on how many objectives the employee must complete.

That said, the employee’s personal improvement plan could take between 30 and 90 days.

During this period, H.R. can create measurable objectives that, after completion, will let them decide if the worker had acceptable performance. It also helps to determine if the employee needs positive reinforcement or if they keep showing poor performance.

A PIP will help you track an employee’s progress or help struggling employees return to their expected performance levels. It will also provide insights into what is missing in your company’s departments.

Suppose you’re an employee’s manager that hasn’t worked with PIP before. In that case, you may wonder, “why should I waste time and effort with recurring performance issues when I can just find another person with a positive attitude?”

The truth is that hiring new people costs money. And companies could have better results when employees feel like they are appreciated.

If you – as a business owner – want to achieve both personal growth and results during a specific timeline, the PIP is perfect for you.

As such, here are the benefits for good managers for using the Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) form with their employees:

Direct Your Company In The Right Track

Every company should strive for a healthy work culture. And to do so, you must create a balance between accountability, achievable goals, and a positive attitude among your employees.

When a worker receives a PIP form, you must make them understand that they must improve performance or there will be repercussions. 

But they should also know that you are there to support them if they need additional training or resources to enhance their work.

Encourage Employees To Do Better

You can use PIP for more than just a disciplinary action or an underperforming employee. You can encourage employees who wish to perform better but don’t know how to do it.

This way, you will turn a valued employee into a team member who will know the expected standard that they must maintain.

Avoid Wasting Company Resources

Companies have limited resources. Each one of their activities is measured with time and money.

When you hire new people, you are wasting these elements. That’s why a performance improvement plan is better than any other solution to secure job performance or track progress.

If you achieve the employee to increase his work performance, you will also be:

• Avoiding falling short of money.
• Saving a significant amount of time and resources in training a new employee.
• Avoiding schedule check-ins for new hires.
• Helping your employees reach their ultimate goal and potential.
• Working with your employees to stay focused on the root causes of their problems.
• Solving small challenges before they turn into big ones.

An Effective PIP Works Better Than Reviews Or Personal Attacks

To help an employee improve, you must let him know. But using traditional methods such as a work review or bringing personal issues into the conversation won’t get you the expected results.

Only using a PIP to provide guidance, a clear path, and clear consequences will lead your workers in the right direction. When an employee receives this, they will know you’re giving them a second chance because you value them.

So, avoid feedback, irrelevant topics, or regular meetings and focus solely on providing an effective PIP to make them try harder.

Less Risk Of Litigations

You have to consider that if you’re creating a PIP, you don’t want to deal with more “employee-struggle” situations.

You’re trying to canalize the employee’s positive aspects and give them a formal document stating what they need to do to improve in a collaborative process.

The PIP is also an excellent way to avoid litigations or retaliations from your employees if you decide to stop working with them. 

After all, you would do this after a structured approach where they didn’t get better, and you chose to terminate the employee.

Apply Employee Mobility

Before you terminate your employee – we recommend this as a last resort – you should consider changing your employee’s job position. 

As an employer, you could offer support by giving a second chance in another department and see how it goes.

You could give your employee a time frame to adjust and recheck them on the end date to see if your strategy worked.

The Performance Improvement Plan applies to all workers. This includes:

• Management positions such as C.E.O.s, C.T.O.s, etc.
• Senior positions.
• Entry level.

The position doesn’t matter. If PIPs are part of your company, you can create a PIP for them and find the root cause of their misperformance.

As such, you can ask a salesperson why his sales targets are low. Based on their information – personal problems, motivations, communication, effectiveness, etc. – you can take the first simple step and develop the PIP.

If you have a small business, you probably are responsible for most of the decision-making processes in your company. 

But, when running a corporation, things are different. To propose a PIP, you will have to send it through various stages for review.

Here’s how you do it:

• If you are a supervisor, you will have to send the PIP proposal to your manager for discussion – you can skip this step if you are the manager.
• The document goes to H.R. so they can review it and give feedback and advice regarding the improvement plan.
• The manager receives it for a final review and then sends it to the supervisor for final delivery.

This usually takes 1-2 business days if the PIP isn’t extensive. But if your employee is underperforming by a lot, the final delivery may take up to a week.

When you create improvement plans, you must include as much detailed information as possible. As such, the document should identify the following:

• The area of concern with specific issues.
• What is expected of your employee.
• Items that lead to productivity improvements.
• A smart framework to implement changes.
• Training related to the employee’s career, resources, and help from superiors to reach his full potential.

If you emphasize these factors, you will have the essential parts of a good PIP. Now, it’s up to the employee to complete it in due time.

Here’s an example of how a Performance Improvement Plan should look like:

“Notice of Performance Improvement Plan

Employee, we have received complaints from multiple customers about low-quality customer support service since August. As such, we have developed a Performance Improvement Plan along with your manager to avoid this issue from happening again.

You will have to follow these instructions by the end of the week and maintain them as your daily work code:

1. Don’t miss work unless you have strict permission from your manager.

2. Have regular check-ins with your supervisor.

3. Receive help from your supervisor and implement each improvement task he proposes.

4. Reduce complaints by 20% by the end of the week.

5. Schedule regular meetings with H.R. to clarify any situation you may have doubts about.

We will review this action plan in a week to see your progress and come up with an end result.

Best Regards,

H.R.”

Now that you know what a PIP looks like, here you can create one in simple steps:

1. Open a new document with a productivity suite like Microsoft Office.

2. Select a subject that will fit the current PIP situation. A beginning could be choosing the main reason you’re creating the PIP.

3. Write down the document’s body, including an introductory paragraph, how the employee is failing, what he needs to do to improve, and a time to succeed.

4. Close by adding any additional information important for your employee to succeed. For example, if he must contact you regularly.

With this in mind, you can get started and follow a structure for your next PIPs.

If you’re all in with a Performance Improvement Plan, you will need a trustable program and suite to develop it.

The best thing you can do is to have a complete productivity suite that works for you when you need it. That’s what Microsoft Office is.

We have prepared a special offer for you. You can get this software by going to RoyalCDKeys and purchasing an official Microsoft Office 2021 CD Key and activate your product. You can then use the serial number during or after Office installation.

This way, you’ll create the best PIPs using incredible templates or building your document from scratch. Review the file in real-time with the manager using the co-authoring feature and send the improvement plan to the struggling employee faster with Outlook.

Save time, corporate money and improve a person’s life using the Office suite.

If after seeing the word PIP templates, you aren’t convinced about using one, and you don’t have time to build it on your own, you could download third-party templates.

Most of them are available for Microsoft Word and similar programs in the Microsoft Store or online, so you won’t have issues.

You can search for them on Google with just a query. Here we gathered the best word templates so you can save time creating your PIPs:

• PIPs separated into sections.
• Colored PIP from the University of Wisconsin.
• PIP collection templates from Best Collections.

You can modify them as you see fit for future PIP processes. Try them in your organization to see which is more beneficial for your company.

The main idea of using a Performance Improvement Plan is to check if an employee’s skills can improve on their current position.

Employers need a committed workforce that can stay positive and do their jobs properly. That’s why businesses have implemented PIPs before laying off employees.

Now, if you think your document doesn’t have a clear trend of success, it could be because it still needs modifications.

Here are some tips you can follow to improve how your PIPs respond.

1. Set clear goals: When you create a performance plan, you should first think about the goals you want to achieve with your employee. Then, you should express them clearly so your worker can retain all of them and prepare to deliver optimal results. The more precise your goals are, the better.

2. Keep confidence in your employee: As employers, you don’t necessarily need to keep faith in your employees, but it does help. If you trust them, you can develop a PIP based on what you want them to improve as effectively as possible.

3. Discuss details with your workers: If you don’t want your employees to fail or present incomplete information on your PIP, you should discuss details related to the improvement plan.

4. Keep a structure that works: Having meetings, completing objectives, suffering stress, and communicating without results. You can avoid these time-consuming tasks if you follow a system. So, start with the first step, and follow the next steps.

5. Clarity over confusion: Don’t make it hard for your employees to understand. Leave clear objectives and simple tasks so they can improve.

The Employee Performance Improvement Plan is an essential tool in business management to deal with struggling employees that have underperformed or those hustling workers that are trying to “climb the ladder” but don’t know what to do.

PIPs will give you access to multiple sources of information about your employees. You can learn the following:

• What is happening in their lives;
• If they need support; 
• If they have burnout;
• Whether they have problems communicating or not;

When you learn more about your workers, you can choose to lay them off or help them increase their metrics and productivity using a critical tool such as the Performance Improvement Plan.