> In medium/large companies, 99.9% of employees can be fired at the end of a HR process and that HR process is something only their line manager can start.
True but note in the US this isn’t for the same reasons that happens in (for example) Europe.
Big companies are better to sue than small companies (they have more money) and were you really fired because you never got any work done or because your manager simply didn’t like you because of something you didn’t control or because they didn’t tell you what you were supposed to do? So the company lawyers and HR people put together a long list of things to go through to make such suits hard to file.
One of those processes are to put people “on a plan”: written warning with super-explicit instructions of what to do. I’ve found in a couple of cases this has been the (final) wake up call that has made someone get back on track. But what sucks is that most companies just treat it as a check off item: once someone is on a plan they can never recover.
Also when the problem is the manager, feedback rarely flows in that direction.
A personal improvement plan is not a fun thing to be on :(.
That said, I do wonder how much the perception of them is skewed by their lack of visibility -- of the cases where I have been aware of a PIP, the only one which was had any real visibility in the wider org was the one where the person ended up leaving the company.
It's entirely plausible that my employer is one of the better ones, though. And even then, I've seen (what appeared to me to be) abuses. One of the things that can come out of a manager putting someone on a PIP is that it's actually the manager who is in the wrong. It takes a good HR team to recognise that, though.
True but note in the US this isn’t for the same reasons that happens in (for example) Europe.
Big companies are better to sue than small companies (they have more money) and were you really fired because you never got any work done or because your manager simply didn’t like you because of something you didn’t control or because they didn’t tell you what you were supposed to do? So the company lawyers and HR people put together a long list of things to go through to make such suits hard to file.
One of those processes are to put people “on a plan”: written warning with super-explicit instructions of what to do. I’ve found in a couple of cases this has been the (final) wake up call that has made someone get back on track. But what sucks is that most companies just treat it as a check off item: once someone is on a plan they can never recover.
Also when the problem is the manager, feedback rarely flows in that direction.