The dreaded PIP. Though the acronym stands for Performance Improvement Plan, to many employees it might just as well mean “Panic-Inducing Punishment.”

The best employers know a PIP can place underperforming staff on a path to transform themselves into better employees. But, in practice, a PIP is too often a half-hearted attempt at giving somebody one last improbable chance to save their job. Sometimes, managers treat the PIP as little more than a mandatory step in the process of firing an employee.

Performance Improvement Plans have so much potential. How can a PIP revive a struggling employee’s job performance?

Every organization will have a unique employee onboarding process. Of course, the details will be partly dictated by administrative, IT, legal, and human resource needs. But, for your onboarding to be effective, it should also be guided by continuous employee feedback.

By bringing empathy into your employee performance reviews, your organization can improve the process for employees and managers alike. You can also increase the positive organizational outcomes that result from well-run, productive employee performance reviews.

NEOGOV was recently honored with inclusion in the GovTech 100, ELGL Choice Awards, and Apps Run the World HCM Top 500 Software Vendors.

Talk to the talent acquisition team at Tesla and they’ll tell you some jobs are hard to fill. If even cool corporations with rich compensation budgets find certain types of jobs hard to fill then what can the public sector do? Well don’t give up, there is an effective strategy.

As an HR professional, your personal brand is one of your most important assets. It’s a mix of who you are, what you’re known for, and how well you’ve proved what you can do. It’s partly the persona you craft and partly the reputation you earn.

Attracting Millennials to government work isn’t always easy, especially when there are higher-paying private sector positions with better benefits. Government may not be able to compete in these areas, but there are other ways you can build a next generation talent pipeline.

HR should be continuously improving its processes: performance management is no exception. Of course, that means that you’ll need some guidelines for reviewing your process. Here is a checklist for identifying where improvements are most needed.

We live in a culture of immediacy. We’re multi-tasking masters. We get maps, taxis, and dates with just a few swipes of a screen. We consume news in tweet-sized tidbits. We watch ten-second videos that disappear. It’s a world filled with distractions galore.

More than a decade ago, the Pew Research Center coined the term “silver tsunami” to describe the anticipated retirement of Baby Boomers. Although the mass wave of retirements was projected to hit government in 2011, the recession put many of these retirement plans on hold. This gave government agencies a bit of respite, but now, according to a number of reputable sources, the long-awaited silver tsunami may have finally arrived.