Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) at Bright

At Bright, we want to continuously provide feedback, some times it’s hard to do so this a quick process guide in which you can execute an ideal Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) plan with your team member. One important thing to clarify — the goal of PiPs is to help employees improve their work so that we can keep them — it is a tool to help employees succeed. A lot of people think the goal of PiPs is to help people leave, but in reality the goal is to help us be able to justify them to stay! Usually we find 50% of people on PiPs end up improving and being able to stay and 50% don’t and have to leave.

Here’s the process:

1. Evaluate if someone should be put on a PiP. Give them time to ramp and if they don’t perform after average ramp time it may be time for a PiP. Make sure to have a standard for how to define underperformance that you stick to — at Bright, if they don’t reach at least 80% of their goals this means they’re underperforming.
2. Identify his/her main areas that they could work on to achieve better results and quantify where they are today versus where they need to be
3. Fill this template (and work to provide very specific examples). Send to People Ops and CEO to get feedback before sharing with your employee since an extreme level of specificity is necessary that’s not always intuitive. A couple additional thoughts for those interested — in our experience, a majority of employees almost have no idea they’re not performing to expectations unless given a document beyond clear that spells it out with clear metrics. Note that this may feel a bit too honest but it’s actually mean to not give honest feedback to someone that could really help them perform. Also remember to establish which will be the consequence if this requirements are not full-filled.
4. Schedule a PIP session with your team member cc People Ops — People Ops will run this meeting (important because they know all the best practices)
5. Execute PIP session providing the specific feedback and make clear the deadline to achieve this plan and the consequences if they do not. Note that People Ops must run this session 1) to ensure best practices are being used and 2) to limit liability if the employee sues.
6. Get signature as a commitment for your team member that he/she understand the provided feedback and deadline.
7. Make sure to do a mid-review PIP, to check in with him/her. This is a great time to repeat expectations and consequences.
8. When reviewing PIP, People Ops will lead the meeting and leading next steps with the back up of performance review data from the manager.

Last word

Remember at Bright we are looking for a top performers culture. If we encourage a culture in which we accept low performance we won´t let future good talent join Bright.