The moment an employee hears the words “performance improvement plan,” something in the room shifts. Their posture changes. Their eyes go somewhere else. In their head, the math is already done – this is the beginning of the end.
It is one of the most stubborn assumptions in team management, and it is almost always wrong.
A Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) isn’t necessarily a paper trail built for an exit. It should be a structure, built for a comeback. And the people who see it up close, the HR managers, the operations leads, the ones sitting in those conversations’ week after week, will tell you that some of the best turnarounds they have ever seen started exactly there.
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Mae Anne Tebangin, Senior HR Manager at TGT Global and Riggs Villagomez, one of our Operations Managers sat down to talk through how TGT Global approaches performance management, with real stories and practical advice you can take straight into your next review conversation.
We give away all of our secrets in the video below – Anne and Riggs provide 15 mins of practical advice on how to get most effectively manage your offshore team.
The misread meaning of a performance improvement plan
Here is where a lot of managers get it wrong. They see a PIP as a last resort, a legal formality before the harder conversation. But that framing misses the whole point.
Mae Anne Tebangin, Senior HR Manager at TGT Global, has guided countless performance processes across teams and clients. She has watched the moment a PIP shifts from a threat into a tool, and she is clear about what the plan is actually for.
“The initial goal of putting a staff member into a performance improvement plan is not to manage them out,” Anne explains. “When we lay out the performance improvement plan, its process, and how it can eventually help the staff, the employee starts to have hope. They become open. They start thinking, let’s give it a shot. We haven’t really done everything we can yet.”
That shift in mindset is the whole game. A PIP gives a struggling employee something that vague feedback and casual check-ins rarely deliver: a focused, directed path forward with clear expectations and a real timeline to meet them.
Performance management starts before a problem exists
There is another misconception worth addressing before we go further. Many managers think performance management is something you do when things go wrong. A review here, a warning there. But Anne argues that this way of thinking already sets the whole process to feel punitive.
For her, performance management begins on the employee’s very first day. Not when the numbers dip. Not when a client raises a concern. Day one.
“There is a misconception that you do performance management only when you do scorecard reviews or feedback sessions, but it shouldn’t be that way,” Anne says. “Once you have your staff start with you on day one, that starts the journey, that starts performance management. You have to plant the seeds for you to be able to grow the staff.”
When the foundation is built that early, a PIP is not a shock. It is a natural part of a process that the employee has always been part of. The ground was prepared long before the plan was needed.
A real story: From non-performer to team lead
This is where it stops being theory.
Riggs Villagomez, Operations Manager at TGT Global, has spent four years working closely with campaigns across different clients. He has seen performance management work, and he has seen what happens when a structured approach is given the time to do its job.
One campaign stands out. The client had offered their entire team a full work-from-home arrangement, a generous move that everyone appreciated. For a while, things looked fine. But over time, the numbers started to tell a different story.
“Over time, we saw a downward trend in terms of performance, especially with certain staff,” Riggs recalls. “The manager had a meeting with me and said the work-from-home arrangement was not working. It was impacting the business, it was impacting performance. So, we came up with a strategy to get the team back to the office.”
It was not an easy sell. The team had settled into their setup. Asking them to return full-time was a real ask. For most of the team, a hybrid model was agreed upon. But for two employees whose performance had dropped the most, the plan was different: five days on site, with a week-by-week performance review over three months.
It worked. By the third month, both staff had turned their performance around. The client was not just satisfied. They were so impressed that they decided to bump up both employees’ salaries.
That outcome did not happen by accident. It happened because someone cared enough to build a structure around the problem instead of walking away from it.
Anne has a story that takes it even further. One employee went through a full six-week PIP, complete with a signed document, clear KPIs, and weekly check-ins between the client and the operations manager. The employee had been through coaching before, but it had not landed with the same weight.
“When you do coaching, employees don’t always realize the seriousness and the gravity of the situation,” Anne says. “Not until they sign a document. They have the numbers to meet, they have the KPIs to achieve. That became a wake-up call.”
Six weeks later, the client chose to keep the employee. Today, that same person is a team lead.
Why do partners not have to do this alone?
If you are a business partner reading this and the whole process sounds like a lot to manage, that reaction is fair. Performance management takes time, structure, and consistency. It is not something most clients are expected to handle on their own.
Riggs keeps his advice practical: show up to your monthly or fortnightly meetings with your operations team. That is where the insights live, where early warning signs get caught before they become bigger problems.
Anne puts it plainly for partners who are not sure where to start.
“Pick up the phone and call your operations manager. They can help you in any way they can. You have a team of experts here, not just one person. You have operations and HR, two full departments working with you. It is not going to be you alone. You have us. And I think that is where your partnership really goes a long way.”
That is the part that gets lost when people think about performance management as something heavy and complicated. The weight is shared. The process is guided. You are not walking into those conversations without backup.
The person behind the plan
Every performance improvement plan has a person at the center of it. Someone who has been struggling, maybe quietly, maybe for longer than anyone noticed. Someone who might just need a clear target, a realistic timeline, and a team willing to assist them.
Done well, a PIP is not a warning. It is a bet placed on someone who still has more to give.
The best team leader you will ever have might be the one who once needed a plan to find their way back. Give them the chance to prove it.
