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I don't know what the motivations for the bosses in this story were, but in corporate America personal improvement plans are fundamentally about gearing up to f

I don't know what the motivations for the bosses in this story were, but in corporate America personal improvement plans are fundamentally about gearing up to fire someone more than any actual improvement. When defending yourself against a wrongful termination lawsuit, it looks good to courts to say, "Look, we met every week, we had these conversations, and things didn't get better enough." In the story linked, it seems like the author was prioritizing family or health over work at times (me: Good! We need more of that!). The employer can't just fire you for that as it looks a lot like wrongful termination. So they need to build up a paper trail.

tigershark 9y ago
Honestly to me it seems that the author was extremely unprofessional. He just disappeared for whole days without letting anyone know. In all the companies that I worked it was explicitly mentioned in the contract that such behaviour was subject to disciplinary actions up to dismissal.
- ciaranm 9y ago
  I'm not sure " To the degree that sometimes my bosses were left hanging, waiting for a day or more on my work." necessarily means what you're saying. There are absolutely ways to communicate that you need a personal day - or that something is delayed because [reasons] - that aren't 'just disappearing'.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    If you need a personal day then use one of your allocated vacation days. It's still unprofessional to be springing these on people at a moment's notice rather than communicating them ahead of time, though. If you aren't using a vacation day then you should absolutely be reachable throughout the entire work day, and disappearing for a day at a time is unacceptable.
- JimDabell 9y ago
  It really depends on how the team was being run. Some remote teams are like co-located teams and work synchronously with set office hours. Other remote teams work asynchronously instead and individuals are free to arrange their work and life as they see fit. In the latter case, if somebody is working on a task that'll take a few days, not hearing from them for a day or two isn't unusual or a problem. It sounds like perhaps he thought all remote work was asynchronous, but his employer wanted him to work synchronously. But it would take a severe communications breakdown for that to get to the point where a weekly performance review was needed. Normally, you'd talk about how this all works before the person is even hired. But honestly, when he describes it as humiliating, having a problem with being managed by younger people, and characterising being "judged" by his bosses as threatening, it does give the impression that the prima donna label isn't far wide of the mark. It's absolutely fine for younger people to manage older people, it's not humiliation to have weekly meetings to resolve a performance problem, and your bosses judging your performance is not a threat, it's a mandatory part of their role.
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    >But it would take a severe communications breakdown for that to get to the point where a weekly performance review was needed. Normally, you'd talk about how this all works before the person is even hired. Frankly, I'm not surprised. Often these expectations are not explicitly set. And often (probably more often than not), managers will let it get to the point of "exploding" and suddenly you find yourself in such a meeting. Many managers are uncomfortable with these conversations. They are often feeling defensive going in, and to counter that they will wait until they have enough "data" to have the conversation. But by that point, the damage is done. Severe communications breakdown? Perhaps. Rare? Not at all.
  - avip 9y ago
    I've never seen a remote setup wherein being unreachable for more than 1 day during normal work days would come across as legit. It sounds downright unprofessional.
    - JimDabell 9y ago
- dasmoth 9y ago
  While there was clearly a mismatch of expectations here, I don't think working in an asynchronous manner is necessarily unprofessional. And there's really not enough information in the original article to see how the mismatched expectations developed.
- comstock 9y ago
  There could be reasons... one thing you might not have experienced is not having explicit management, and not even knowing who you /should/ inform. That happens from time to time. This is possibly indicated by "bosses". Not having explicit line management sucks.
  - VonGallifrey 9y ago
    There is a really easy solution to the "no explicit management" problem: Just go to 1 boss and ask "When I want to take a vacation day, who do I talk to/what is the process for that?" Works best if that is early on after joining the company. Or just ask the same question to HR, they would guaranteed know what the process is.
    - comstock 9y ago
      It doesn't always work in my experience. The guy who signs off on vacations might be different than the guy managing day-to-day work. There might not be a clear vacation policy (as much as you like etc). Ask HR? I've worked at companies with 100 people who had no dedicated HR staff...
    - ianai 9y ago
      In my case, I had a supervisor magic-up a title promotion for himself based on seniority. He started telling everyone he was "the lead supervisor" including his peers. His peer, my direct supervisor, told me to escalate work/issues to the "lead supervisor" before our manager. When I did check with HR/higher management, they were flummoxed.
- x0x0 9y ago
  If this were a problem, then his or her manager should have said something the very first time it happened. Waiting for it to happen multiple times and being on the verge of firing someone before telling the employee they didn't like it is wildly incompetent.
  - king_magic 9y ago
    It's entirely possible (and this is pure speculation) that this was a pattern his managers observed, and one that continued even with regular corrective feedback. I've been on the managerial end of that situation and it's really no fun when no improvement is seen even when expectations (and consequences) are clearly and explicitly laid out. Some people just don't get it - but again totally speculation, may not really apply in this situation.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  You are making a lot of assumptions on what is "professional". A contract is an agreement. There are companies paying very high salaries to very low - expecting very high commitment to very low - in various combinations. It's up to the company to clarify expectations.
- ptero 9y ago
  The article is vague about what the main problem was in the bosses view, which they must have told him at the original "needs improvement" meeting (they actually should have told him earlier in a friendlier setting, too). If it was his non availability when expected (meetings/telecons) or missing explicitly agreed to deadlines, I agree with your non-professional label. If he got a task to do in 3 days and delivered in 3 days he did just fine even if he was on a beach with the phone off the first day. In this case the failure is with the management who didn't know how to run a remote team (which is a rare skill, too).
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    It depends on what the work is like, too. In practice all of the most successful teams I've been on have been highly collaborative (i.e. reachable). The kind of team where everyone goes incommunicado for days on end working on independent deliverables tends to suffer from low velocity, poor team cohesion, and ultimately inferior quality. I'm collaborating with coworkers constantly throughout the day, including occasionally sitting in front of the same computer to work through something. Change latency from seconds to days and everything suffers.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  It does seem that was the case and then if you can simply say "please never disappear for the whole day without telling me" and that would be the end of it. I think there's more going on here.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    "Please be reachable during normal business hours" is a very reasonable demand of remote coworkers. Most of the problems I've ever had with remote coworkers was with them not being reachable and consequently blocking team progress. These people inevitably got poor performance reviews and did not move up in the company, and some got fired. When you can turn to your coworker next to you and ask a simple one minute question that unblocks you, but you can't reach your remote coworker for an entire day and you thus fail to make progress for an entire day because of their truancy, you begin to resent them really quickly. It doesn't matter if you're their manager or not; it's super irritating.
    - quantumhobbit 9y ago
      Did you communicate to them that their absence blocked work? If you didn't, they likely thought that there were no problems and continued in that behavior. Part of what makes corporate America suck is the kind of passive aggressive resentments that never get expressed. Suddenly the remote worker finds that everyone hates him and has no clue why.
csydas 9y ago
I think that is a somewhat cynical view of the matter; I appreciate that "American Work Ethics" are highly flawed and mostly theatrics (I say this as an American expat who has experienced work from all over the globe), but as much as there is management theatrics in the US, there's also a lot of "woe is me" from employees when they're disciplined. I'd really hate to see how the author of the piece would have reacted to the Russian Managers at the company I'm with at the moment, as the managers certainly don't sugar coat when they're unhappy; it's not abusive, it's just very to the point. Having been a manager when I still worked in the US, it was incredibly difficult to correct inappropriate behavior because virtually every time you did, you did it wrong to whoever you were correcting. Try to be gentle? You were unclear. Try to be polite but to the point? You were curt. This sort of dance suggests to me that we just don't handle criticism well professionally in the US. I'm sure this is just observer bias, but I see a tendency to avoid confrontation at any cost, with too many places hoping it just "works out". I do think it's from both sides of the employer/employee line. I have been at places that were more interested in just removing people who had some bad habits or needed to have a line drawn for some behavior while otherwise being model employees. I have also seen employees who were absolutely resistant to any criticism for a multitude of reasons, and ultimately the just continued with bad behavior until they were fired or left the company out of frustration with the constant meetings. The author touches on some very true feelings in the article - no one likes being reprimanded. It's harsh, it's embarrassing, and it saps your ego for many reasons. But like others have commented, I do think that they acted unprofessionally - I imagine the story would have been much different had the author simply PM's a manager or boss "hey, family issue, going to be incognito today, I'll try to get an update by X" or just anything to keep them in the loop. The author also seemed unaware of the expectations of their bosses before hand, so maybe that's the fault of the company or the fault of the author. The age disparity I appreciate the uncomfortableness of, but it's going to be something that is more and more of a reality. (Ageism in tech is very real, so not discounting that, but the reality of the world is that there are going to be many young tech managers; staying out of management is great, but it needs to come with the understanding that eventually you'll be older than your bosses on average).
- cloakandswagger 9y ago
  Unfortunately it seems that the same smiley, inoffensive, A-for-effort mentality that exists in our school system has fully invaded the corporate world. I experienced this personally after talking to a report about their absenteeism. Within a day I received a lengthy email from them complaining about my directness. That 30 second exchange was escalated to management; they agreed that my feedback was justified (the employee in question had missed our team's only recurring meeting for the past month) but suggested I adjust my "tone" to avoid embarrassing them. I can't help but see similarities when I read this article. Speak directly to someone and they'll get their feelings hurt. Sugarcoat it and they'll claim that you weren't clear enough. Casually hint at the issue and they'll claim you were passive aggressive. Something is fundamentally wrong with an environment where adults can't have honest and direct interaction for fear of hurting someone's feelings.
rev_null 9y ago
A less cynical viewpoint is that personal improvement plans give an employee time to job hunt.
- softawre 9y ago
  I've made that comment to people when I've put them on a PIP before. We both knew what was going on...
scarface74 9y ago
If occasionally you have to do something for your family during hours you have to work, you at least owe your coworkers/manager a quick "I'll be offline for a few hours". He didn't do that. There was no indication from the article that the company demanded unreasonable hours.
dba7dba 9y ago
This is very true in corporate America. They are NOT really interested in improving your work performance. They are simply starting the process of letting you go while building up the necessary paper trail to show employment lawyers (in case they show up) that the management did their best to try to help the employee improve performance but that it just didn't work out. They are just covering their butts. So if you ever get called in for performance improvement meeting by your manager, you should just start looking for a new job. Or at least start saving your money for unemployment. And as for the original poster, I'm sorry that it happened but he should've been up front about his schedule so that his managers know what's going on.
pasbesoin 9y ago
Yep. U.S. "improvement plans": Accumulate actions and documentation to justify and CYA the action already planned. If you ever face one of those, and you have the option to walk away and start something else / somewhere else, go. Just like the B.S. in the name, "improvement plan", anything they say that sounds positive about the action is most likely just being disingenuous. I'll take all this back a step further: If you are not happy with the job, or have a lot of friction with your management, walk away. The sooner you get out, the better -- for your peace of mind, career, and reputation. Real improvement is sadly lacking from many workplaces, these days. The HR ideal, again contrary to what they say and the ideals they "paint" in their rhetoric, is the completely fungible employee. If you haven't experienced real improvement in the workplace and in your own career before seeing an "improvement plan", you certainly aren't going to see it, after. Well, I guess there are the occasional exceptions. Don't count on being one. Trust your gut. Even when the resulting action you need to take is "hard". Neglecting your intuition -- real intuition; you usually know it when it hits -- ends up being much harder, in the long run.

tigershark 9y ago

Honestly to me it seems that the author was extremely unprofessional. He just disappeared for whole days without letting anyone know. In all the companies that I worked it was explicitly mentioned in the contract that such behaviour was subject to disciplinary actions up to dismissal.

ciaranm 9y ago
I'm not sure " To the degree that sometimes my bosses were left hanging, waiting for a day or more on my work." necessarily means what you're saying. There are absolutely ways to communicate that you need a personal day - or that something is delayed because [reasons] - that aren't 'just disappearing'.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  If you need a personal day then use one of your allocated vacation days. It's still unprofessional to be springing these on people at a moment's notice rather than communicating them ahead of time, though. If you aren't using a vacation day then you should absolutely be reachable throughout the entire work day, and disappearing for a day at a time is unacceptable.
JimDabell 9y ago
It really depends on how the team was being run. Some remote teams are like co-located teams and work synchronously with set office hours. Other remote teams work asynchronously instead and individuals are free to arrange their work and life as they see fit. In the latter case, if somebody is working on a task that'll take a few days, not hearing from them for a day or two isn't unusual or a problem. It sounds like perhaps he thought all remote work was asynchronous, but his employer wanted him to work synchronously. But it would take a severe communications breakdown for that to get to the point where a weekly performance review was needed. Normally, you'd talk about how this all works before the person is even hired. But honestly, when he describes it as humiliating, having a problem with being managed by younger people, and characterising being "judged" by his bosses as threatening, it does give the impression that the prima donna label isn't far wide of the mark. It's absolutely fine for younger people to manage older people, it's not humiliation to have weekly meetings to resolve a performance problem, and your bosses judging your performance is not a threat, it's a mandatory part of their role.
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >But it would take a severe communications breakdown for that to get to the point where a weekly performance review was needed. Normally, you'd talk about how this all works before the person is even hired. Frankly, I'm not surprised. Often these expectations are not explicitly set. And often (probably more often than not), managers will let it get to the point of "exploding" and suddenly you find yourself in such a meeting. Many managers are uncomfortable with these conversations. They are often feeling defensive going in, and to counter that they will wait until they have enough "data" to have the conversation. But by that point, the damage is done. Severe communications breakdown? Perhaps. Rare? Not at all.
- avip 9y ago
  I've never seen a remote setup wherein being unreachable for more than 1 day during normal work days would come across as legit. It sounds downright unprofessional.
  - JimDabell 9y ago
dasmoth 9y ago
While there was clearly a mismatch of expectations here, I don't think working in an asynchronous manner is necessarily unprofessional. And there's really not enough information in the original article to see how the mismatched expectations developed.
comstock 9y ago
There could be reasons... one thing you might not have experienced is not having explicit management, and not even knowing who you /should/ inform. That happens from time to time. This is possibly indicated by "bosses". Not having explicit line management sucks.
- VonGallifrey 9y ago
  There is a really easy solution to the "no explicit management" problem: Just go to 1 boss and ask "When I want to take a vacation day, who do I talk to/what is the process for that?" Works best if that is early on after joining the company. Or just ask the same question to HR, they would guaranteed know what the process is.
  - comstock 9y ago
    It doesn't always work in my experience. The guy who signs off on vacations might be different than the guy managing day-to-day work. There might not be a clear vacation policy (as much as you like etc). Ask HR? I've worked at companies with 100 people who had no dedicated HR staff...
  - ianai 9y ago
    In my case, I had a supervisor magic-up a title promotion for himself based on seniority. He started telling everyone he was "the lead supervisor" including his peers. His peer, my direct supervisor, told me to escalate work/issues to the "lead supervisor" before our manager. When I did check with HR/higher management, they were flummoxed.
x0x0 9y ago
If this were a problem, then his or her manager should have said something the very first time it happened. Waiting for it to happen multiple times and being on the verge of firing someone before telling the employee they didn't like it is wildly incompetent.
- king_magic 9y ago
  It's entirely possible (and this is pure speculation) that this was a pattern his managers observed, and one that continued even with regular corrective feedback. I've been on the managerial end of that situation and it's really no fun when no improvement is seen even when expectations (and consequences) are clearly and explicitly laid out. Some people just don't get it - but again totally speculation, may not really apply in this situation.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
You are making a lot of assumptions on what is "professional". A contract is an agreement. There are companies paying very high salaries to very low - expecting very high commitment to very low - in various combinations. It's up to the company to clarify expectations.
ptero 9y ago
The article is vague about what the main problem was in the bosses view, which they must have told him at the original "needs improvement" meeting (they actually should have told him earlier in a friendlier setting, too). If it was his non availability when expected (meetings/telecons) or missing explicitly agreed to deadlines, I agree with your non-professional label. If he got a task to do in 3 days and delivered in 3 days he did just fine even if he was on a beach with the phone off the first day. In this case the failure is with the management who didn't know how to run a remote team (which is a rare skill, too).
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  It depends on what the work is like, too. In practice all of the most successful teams I've been on have been highly collaborative (i.e. reachable). The kind of team where everyone goes incommunicado for days on end working on independent deliverables tends to suffer from low velocity, poor team cohesion, and ultimately inferior quality. I'm collaborating with coworkers constantly throughout the day, including occasionally sitting in front of the same computer to work through something. Change latency from seconds to days and everything suffers.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
It does seem that was the case and then if you can simply say "please never disappear for the whole day without telling me" and that would be the end of it. I think there's more going on here.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  "Please be reachable during normal business hours" is a very reasonable demand of remote coworkers. Most of the problems I've ever had with remote coworkers was with them not being reachable and consequently blocking team progress. These people inevitably got poor performance reviews and did not move up in the company, and some got fired. When you can turn to your coworker next to you and ask a simple one minute question that unblocks you, but you can't reach your remote coworker for an entire day and you thus fail to make progress for an entire day because of their truancy, you begin to resent them really quickly. It doesn't matter if you're their manager or not; it's super irritating.
  - quantumhobbit 9y ago
    Did you communicate to them that their absence blocked work? If you didn't, they likely thought that there were no problems and continued in that behavior. Part of what makes corporate America suck is the kind of passive aggressive resentments that never get expressed. Suddenly the remote worker finds that everyone hates him and has no clue why.

csydas 9y ago

I think that is a somewhat cynical view of the matter; I appreciate that "American Work Ethics" are highly flawed and mostly theatrics (I say this as an American expat who has experienced work from all over the globe), but as much as there is management theatrics in the US, there's also a lot of "woe is me" from employees when they're disciplined. I'd really hate to see how the author of the piece would have reacted to the Russian Managers at the company I'm with at the moment, as the managers certainly don't sugar coat when they're unhappy; it's not abusive, it's just very to the point. Having been a manager when I still worked in the US, it was incredibly difficult to correct inappropriate behavior because virtually every time you did, you did it wrong to whoever you were correcting. Try to be gentle? You were unclear. Try to be polite but to the point? You were curt. This sort of dance suggests to me that we just don't handle criticism well professionally in the US. I'm sure this is just observer bias, but I see a tendency to avoid confrontation at any cost, with too many places hoping it just "works out". I do think it's from both sides of the employer/employee line. I have been at places that were more interested in just removing people who had some bad habits or needed to have a line drawn for some behavior while otherwise being model employees. I have also seen employees who were absolutely resistant to any criticism for a multitude of reasons, and ultimately the just continued with bad behavior until they were fired or left the company out of frustration with the constant meetings. The author touches on some very true feelings in the article - no one likes being reprimanded. It's harsh, it's embarrassing, and it saps your ego for many reasons. But like others have commented, I do think that they acted unprofessionally - I imagine the story would have been much different had the author simply PM's a manager or boss "hey, family issue, going to be incognito today, I'll try to get an update by X" or just anything to keep them in the loop. The author also seemed unaware of the expectations of their bosses before hand, so maybe that's the fault of the company or the fault of the author. The age disparity I appreciate the uncomfortableness of, but it's going to be something that is more and more of a reality. (Ageism in tech is very real, so not discounting that, but the reality of the world is that there are going to be many young tech managers; staying out of management is great, but it needs to come with the understanding that eventually you'll be older than your bosses on average).

cloakandswagger 9y ago
Unfortunately it seems that the same smiley, inoffensive, A-for-effort mentality that exists in our school system has fully invaded the corporate world. I experienced this personally after talking to a report about their absenteeism. Within a day I received a lengthy email from them complaining about my directness. That 30 second exchange was escalated to management; they agreed that my feedback was justified (the employee in question had missed our team's only recurring meeting for the past month) but suggested I adjust my "tone" to avoid embarrassing them. I can't help but see similarities when I read this article. Speak directly to someone and they'll get their feelings hurt. Sugarcoat it and they'll claim that you weren't clear enough. Casually hint at the issue and they'll claim you were passive aggressive. Something is fundamentally wrong with an environment where adults can't have honest and direct interaction for fear of hurting someone's feelings.

rev_null 9y ago

A less cynical viewpoint is that personal improvement plans give an employee time to job hunt.

softawre 9y ago
I've made that comment to people when I've put them on a PIP before. We both knew what was going on...

scarface74 9y ago

If occasionally you have to do something for your family during hours you have to work, you at least owe your coworkers/manager a quick "I'll be offline for a few hours". He didn't do that. There was no indication from the article that the company demanded unreasonable hours.

dba7dba 9y ago

This is very true in corporate America. They are NOT really interested in improving your work performance. They are simply starting the process of letting you go while building up the necessary paper trail to show employment lawyers (in case they show up) that the management did their best to try to help the employee improve performance but that it just didn't work out. They are just covering their butts. So if you ever get called in for performance improvement meeting by your manager, you should just start looking for a new job. Or at least start saving your money for unemployment. And as for the original poster, I'm sorry that it happened but he should've been up front about his schedule so that his managers know what's going on.

pasbesoin 9y ago

Yep. U.S. "improvement plans": Accumulate actions and documentation to justify and CYA the action already planned. If you ever face one of those, and you have the option to walk away and start something else / somewhere else, go. Just like the B.S. in the name, "improvement plan", anything they say that sounds positive about the action is most likely just being disingenuous. I'll take all this back a step further: If you are not happy with the job, or have a lot of friction with your management, walk away. The sooner you get out, the better -- for your peace of mind, career, and reputation. Real improvement is sadly lacking from many workplaces, these days. The HR ideal, again contrary to what they say and the ideals they "paint" in their rhetoric, is the completely fungible employee. If you haven't experienced real improvement in the workplace and in your own career before seeing an "improvement plan", you certainly aren't going to see it, after. Well, I guess there are the occasional exceptions. Don't count on being one. Trust your gut. Even when the resulting action you need to take is "hard". Neglecting your intuition -- real intuition; you usually know it when it hits -- ends up being much harder, in the long run.