Performance plans, or performance improvement plans, are extremely verbose formal documents that are used as a last step to tie up all legal requirements before terminating an employee. These are most commonly used in countries outside US.
Most of the US follows At-will employment[0], so generally no performance plans are necessary.
This is not public. We've only used it twice, one person was suspected of misappropriation of funds (and later proven), and one that's currently in motion is an employee that misrepresented their technical knowledge i.e. cannot write code, convinced other employees to do 90% of their contributions.
I get that there is this impression of the US whipping everyone until they work themselves to death. Anecdotal, but I've never really experienced that. If anything, the folk in the US like being busy, and workplaces (at least in tech) are overly happy, in something that reminds me of a cult.
I have lived an worked in 5 countries in 3 continents and worked with people living in many more countries. In my own observations, the US colleagues have usually exhibited the highest level of happiness/satisfaction. They also tend to find their next jobs the quickest. And are paid the highest.
Thanks for the info. Interesting. But I assume this (i.e. the plan) is something that the employee can choose not to sign if it was not in the original contract and the law doesn't require him to do so. At least I wouldn't sign anything like that. And if he doesn't sign it then you can try firing him. Which might or might not be legal (which usually a court decides). At least that's how it works in those countries I worked in.
It's also not rare and it's actually on the news all the time all around in Europe and Japan that a company fires someone whom later the company is forced to hire back by court ruling.
Most of the US follows At-will employment[0], so generally no performance plans are necessary.
This is not public. We've only used it twice, one person was suspected of misappropriation of funds (and later proven), and one that's currently in motion is an employee that misrepresented their technical knowledge i.e. cannot write code, convinced other employees to do 90% of their contributions.
I get that there is this impression of the US whipping everyone until they work themselves to death. Anecdotal, but I've never really experienced that. If anything, the folk in the US like being busy, and workplaces (at least in tech) are overly happy, in something that reminds me of a cult.
I have lived an worked in 5 countries in 3 continents and worked with people living in many more countries. In my own observations, the US colleagues have usually exhibited the highest level of happiness/satisfaction. They also tend to find their next jobs the quickest. And are paid the highest.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment