As another comment says, it's "performance improvement plan": saying to the employee that they're not meeting expectations and they need to hit a set of goals o

As another comment says, it's "performance improvement plan": saying to the employee that they're not meeting expectations and they need to hit a set of goals or be fired. It's part of the documentation process used by companies to protect against liability: if they're going to fire you they want a paper trail of a nondiscriminatory reason why they did it. The "rosier" theoretical side is that a PIP is a wake-up call to a struggling employee that gives them a chance to improve. Here the claim is that the manager was forced to put X number of people on PIP regardless, which would be under something like a stack ranking system where a manager isn't allowed to say all their employees are performing adequately, they have to choose some to put on the chopping block. Amazon is famous for doing this.