What a real PIP looks like: five published specimens

Reading the form instead of the advice

Most writing about performance plans describes them in general. A few employers publish the actual documents — a British university puts its form online with two worked examples filled in, and several American public-sector and university employers publish theirs. They are worth reading because a form shows what its author expects to happen, in a way advice about forms does not.

This page describes them rather than reproducing them. The documents are linked at the foot of the page if you want to see one in full.

Two cautions before the detail. These are university and public-sector employers, which have grievance and appeal machinery many private employers do not, so their procedural generosity does not generalise. And one institution's form is a specimen, not a national standard: what follows is what these particular documents show.

The skeleton is the same; the clauses are not

Laid side by side, the forms agree on structure. A target area, the concern with dates and examples, the standard expected, the actions agreed, the support offered, review dates, notes at each review, and a date by which the standard should be met. The British form is a table of eight columns; the American ones run as numbered steps with a signature block. Same content, different furniture.

The differences that matter are in the clauses, and there are four worth knowing about.

The signature line says something different

The British form's signature block records that the plan has been agreed by the manager and the employee, both signing. The American institutional norm is acknowledgement of receipt.

That is not a formality. A form recording agreement invites you to negotiate the content before you sign it — proposing a revised date, a missing piece of support, a standard you can actually measure. A form recording receipt is asking you to confirm the meeting happened. The page on signing is where that split is worked through, because it is the single most consequential thing the form tells you.

Support is a column, and a column can be empty

On the British form, support is a first-class column, and the worked examples fill it concretely — software training, and shadowing a named colleague. One example goes further and writes a manager obligation into the plan itself: the supervisor is to check the data too.

That matters because it gives an empty support column something to be measured against. An official specimen filling it in is the answer to a plan that leaves it blank.

The tempos are an order of magnitude apart

The British examples run a first review at four weeks, with the standard expected within eight weeks in one case and six months in the other. The American forms default to thirty, sixty and ninety days, with one template offering sixty, seventy-five or ninety-day options and another setting attendance plans at ninety days.

If you have read that plans "usually" run for a particular length, these documents are the correction. Length is a local convention, and yours is whatever your own plan says. What the length is and is not evidence of takes that further, including whether a plan can end before its own date.

The clause that widens what you can be dismissed for

This is the sharpest thing in any of the specimens. One American template's consequences sentence fuses two categories: failing to meet expectations or any display of gross misconduct will result in discipline up to termination.

Those two are not equivalent anywhere. In the United States misconduct forfeits unemployment benefit where performance failure does not. In the United Kingdom it removes the good-reason defence against a benefit sanction. In Spain the disciplinary route carries no severance where the objective route pays. A performance plan carrying a misconduct trigger in the same sentence has widened the grounds beyond performance, and it is worth noticing on your own document — the country pages are where the consequence of that line differs.

The forms list more endings than passing or being fired

One American form names termination, transfer or demotion as possible outcomes. That is a useful corrective to the way plans are usually described, and in some countries it is more than an option: in the Netherlands and Portugal, considering redeployment is a step the employer is required to take rather than a favour it may offer.

The employer's own dated paperwork

The American forms schedule the employer's writing as well as yours: a thirty-day update memo, a forty-five or sixty-day update, a sixty to ninety-day status memo — each with a named person responsible and a completion date. One American university's guidance requires HR to approve the plan before it is reviewed and signed with the employee, which confirms from the paperwork itself what the employers' playbook page describes: by the time you first see it, the document has been through a review you were not part of.

Every one of those scheduled memos is a date on which something is written about you. Holding your own dated version of the same checkpoint is the symmetric habit.

"Sustained" appears here too

One public-employer manual carries a recurrence section and instructs managers to say that the expected level must be sustained, or further action follows. The same idea appears in the vendor guidance, and it means the same thing in both: meeting the targets once does not close the file. What that means for a reader who passes is the other side of this page.

One American form is also candid in a way worth recording. It states that a plan is not a disciplinary action while also being a formal warning about performance, and acknowledges that most employees read a plan as part of the termination process. The dual character is admitted in the employer's own document.

These are particular forms, and yours will differ

Fairhanded is not a law firm. These are particular employers' forms, published by them, and yours will differ. Where a clause on your own plan looks like the misconduct trigger described above, that is a question for an employment lawyer where you live rather than for a guide.