I doubt it. You can just slow down and be fired. Severance is a pittance to them.

What they are really trying to avoid is laying off the wrong people. Management is really bad at guessing who wants to stay and who wants out. Often, a bunch of “low performers” are riffed. Some are bad, some are just on the wrong team, some are having life complications- birth, death, divorce, etc.

It’s really bad PR to fire someone who is a low performer because of a bad pregnancy, grandma died, etc. especially when they call a reporter and show their stellar ratings from previous years.

On top of all that, with the rif comes a higher work load. At this time many high performers will quit, which sucks because you just laid off a bunch of people, many of whom were close to these guys in performance.

Then the company is at risk of making bad decisions. They they push even harder on those that remain? Do they become pragmatic and cut initiatives they can no longer staff?

All moves have risk.

Generally, people who get PIP'd don't get severance, even if fired.

The real purpose of the PIP process is to grind people down so they make mistakes, costing them what could otherwise be beautiful lawsuits [1], or just stop showing up (which I guess would fall under quitting, since they end up firing themselves, at least bureaucratically speaking).

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[1] This is surprisingly easy to do in the US. If you post about your termination on social media, this can be construed as "cause after the fact" and make a termination that was in fact unjust or unlawful now legal. The employer's argument becomes that they knew you held malice toward the company ("cause") but couldn't prove it--the social media activity becomes said "proof".

That may be for more cold blooded companies but most PIPs I've witnessed have gotten severance and actually good packages to boot.

Same here. Severance is very cheap in the grand scheme of things. If someone is a poor performer, they're essentially a negative value add. Your default is continuing to pay them a salary, so you may as well agree to continue to do that for a number of weeks and just have them not work. I've seen 2 weeks for every year at the firm as standard

It's not necessarily about severance; could be keeping unemployment insurance premiums low, too.

Yes, most people dont realize companies can be financially impacted through the unemployment system when they lay someone off even if there are no direct severance payments.

An employee who quits isnt eligible for unemployment.

(these rules obviously vary by country/state/etc)

Agree, I mostly saw: Take this generous amount of money and hand in your resignation or you won't have to come back tomorrow and you get nothing.

Take this generous amount of money (1 month pay) and SIGN THIS WAIVER RELEASING US OF ALL FUTURE LIABILITIES is the important part.

also usually anti-badmouthing clauses in both directions. “you may never blog about this experience”

> Generally, people who get PIP'd don't get severance, even if fired.

Not quite true at Amazon, the most infamous PIP user. You get put on "Focus". If you fail that, you are offered severance or to go on a PIP. True, once you're on the PIP, you're not going to get a severance offer. (This is all according to https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/amazon, which is excerpted by the author here https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1537810787473006593.)

I have never, at any company, found this to be true.

Not knowing who is worth firing seems like mismanagement to me alongside the obvious " do more work plebs and you'll be safe"

Once you get paid, you and the company are even. Of course one would want as much reasonable employee protection as usual but practical realities dictate that you shouldn't get something for nothing.