Download these 05 Free Performance Improvement Plan Templates to assist you in the process of drafting your very own Performance Improvement Plan easily.

A Performance Improvement Plan is commonly known as PIP. It is a very common practice in organizations and companies. Although it’s a routine work-related activity in companies somehow this plan has got a bad reputation. A performance improvement plan is essentially a guideline from your employer about how you can improve your performance. This is the whole story. You are just given a clear list of instructions about what is wrong with your performance. This list will include how it’s gone bad over the past few months, and what improvements the company wants to see in your performance within a period.

Uses and Importance of Performance Improvement Plan:

Uses:

As soon someone hears that he is given a performance improvement plan, they think are they being fired but the actual situation is on the contrary. If your company wants to fire you due to your poor performance, nothing is stopping them. When you are given a PIP, you still have the chance to turn things around. Meanwhile, you should prove that you can fulfill your organization’s expectations. Firing an existing employee and getting a better worker is not a problem for organizations. Especially with the growing unemployment figures around the world. However professional organizations understand that employee turnover should be kept at a minimum. This is the key reason for developing a performance improvement plan.

Free Performance Improvement Plan Templates:

Here are previews and download links for these Performance Improvement Plan Templates mostly in MS Word Format.

Importance:

With this plan, employers not only give another chance to their low-performing employees to prove they are worth keeping. Companies can increase motivation and competition within the workplace between employees. Although it’s not very common still some companies use these plans as tactics to keep their employees’ expectations about salary increases and promotions at a minimum. You can understand that when you ask for 15% raise your employer hands you PIP. Now at this moment, your mind will tell you to settle for an even 5% increase in the salary given the situation where the employer is not happy with your performance. You will think of being lucky if you are still not fired let alone given a raise or promotion.

Still, the key essence of a performance improvement plan is to motivate the employees toward constant efficiency. Planning for better personal development at the workplace is very imperative. It’s possible that before giving you a PIP, your employer or supervisor will have a thorough one-on-one meeting with you. He may discuss, what problems he sees in your performance. He may try to eliminate the problematic factors within the meeting. If he sees no improvement or evaluates the problems as having a deeper root cause, you will be issued an official performance improvement plan.

Preparing an effective performance improvement plan is not a big deal. There are several sites available on the internet that offer pre-formatted templates. These templates are ready-made documents in which you just have to put your details and your plan is ready. To help you out, we have listed our own created free and customizable performance improvement plan templates below. To download these templates, just click on the download button and you will have your template in no time.

Market Practices of Performance Improvement Plan:

Expectations included in the PIP should be realistic:

If your employees are working on a level that you think can be improved, it gives you the chance to ask them for improvement but there is no magic involved in this process. It’s not like a magic wand that you can move and employees will have an instant boost in their performance. While preparing a performance improvement plan, your expectations and required goals should be realistic. You might think that setting the bar too high will give motivation to employees but the whole plan can backfire if the employees see the PIP with unachievable results.

Communication is the Key to the Whole Process:

If an employee observes that he is asked to do too much without any help from the company or his supervisor, it can instantly make them disappointed and start looking for another job. Remember that communication is the most important part of a performance improvement process. When you ask your employees to improve their performance, they should be given some voice to explain why there is a problem in the first place. It is necessary to know what issues they are having in the workplace that might have caused these performance-related issues.

Solving the Root Causes of Problems:

The key reason for using a PIP is to ensure that your employees deliver their maximum output. If anything is bothering them, you can eliminate those issues if they are related to the workplace. As an employer, if you are going to use the output of a performance improvement plan against the employee, maybe this is not what you want.

On the other hand, as an employee when you are given a PIP, you should be thankful to your employer. It means he still has some trust in you. However, you shouldn’t give up hope with the expectation of ultimate termination, even if you follow up on the improvement plan. You should be able to answer all the questions clearly to ensure you are given the chance for improvement. As an employer when you see that an employee is having performance issues due to work-related problems, you should help eliminate these issues.