Do you want to quickly make a PIP performance improvement plan online form in WordPress?
An online performance improvement plan, also known as a performance action plan, is a powerful tool to help struggling employees succeed. It provides them with simple goals to meet to avoid transfer, demotion, or being fired.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to make a (PIP) performance improvement plan for your business on your company’s WordPress website.
How to Write a (PIP) Performance Improvement Plan
Writing a performance improvement plan can help your employees be better at their jobs. If your company is like most others, you’ve probably got some type of system to see how well people are doing at their jobs.
But, do you have a system in place to help your employees who are struggling? Your performance development planning process should clearly outline the specific steps that an employee needs to take to improve performance.
Using an online performance improvement plan, your Human Resources department can get rid of the costs that come with firing people, and create a happier workplace culture.
Although it’s necessary to point out where your employee is failing, you should also create an action plan to help them succeed, both personally and professionally. Before you begin writing your (PIP) performance improvement plan, you must:
- Decide the quality of work you expect
- Outline goals
- Identify the cause for performance issues
- Decide how to support the employee
- Create a check-in calendar
- Decide the outcome if they don’t get better
Here are some basic guidelines for writing your performance improvement plan. Your plan should provide:
- Documentation and an explanation for why the employee is being placed on a PIP
- Inform the employee of what happens if they fail to meet PIP requirements
- Your company’s documentation regarding the employee’s rights
- A clearly outlined action plan for both the employee and their manager
- Additional support, training, and resources to help your employee meet the PIP goals
- PIP information shared with the employee’s manager
Performance Improvement Plan (PIP): Why Use an Online Form?
If you’re working in HR, creating a performance improvement plan should be an easy task that’s aimed at helping supervisors understand an employee’s improvement.
But making new PIPs for each employee’s situation is a lot of work, and can be time-consuming, frustrating, and stressful. So why not try creating a (PIP) performance improvement plan online form?
An online personal performance improvement plan will make your job a lot easier because it’s:
- Faster: Since info is gathered automatically, you won’t have to wait for paper responses.
- Customizable: You can use a PIP template and then quickly customize it for each situation.
- Convenient: Employees can fill out the form online, and you’ll have it in your inbox immediately.
- Easier Follow-up: Have PIP emails sent to managers, supervisors, and other administrative staff automatically.
- Customized Branding: Use your official company logo and more.
- Custom Messages and Redirects: Upon submission, send employees a message, or redirect them to a page on your site or another site of your choice.
- Efficient Data Handling: You can easily view, search for, filter, print, and delete any of the PIP form entries.
Using the WPForms’ performance improvement plan form, you can:
- Collect employee names
- Choose areas of improvement
- Create SMART goals with explanations
- Set improvement deadlines
- And more
Then, after the evaluation is finished, you can sign off on it so you know they’ve completed the assessment.
We’ve created a performance improvement plan form demo so you can see how easily you can get started even if you’re not very technical.
So now that you know why you should make an online (PIP) performance improvement plan, let’s dive into exactly how it’s done.
How to Make a (PIP) Performance Improvement Plan Online Form
So, if you’re asking yourself, how do I make a (PIP) performance improvement plan form? Here’s a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how.
Step 1: Make a (PIP) Performance Improvement Plan Online Form
Using WPForms is the easiest way to make an online performance improvement plan for your company’s Human Resources department.
WPForms Pro has tons of pre-built templates for every niche and industry, including one specifically for performance improvement planning.
The first thing you’ll want to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, check out this step-by-step guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.
Next, go to WPForms » Add New and type in a name for your form.
Then, scroll down to the Select a Template section and type “performance improvement plan” into the search bar. There are 2 PIP form templates you can choose from, depending on which better fits your needs.
Here a quick comparison of them:
| Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) Form | Performance Improvement Plan Form |
|---|---|
| Manager Name | Your Email |
| Manager Email | Employee Name |
| Employee Name | Areas of Improvement (checkboxes) |
| Employee Email | Please describe the reason(s) for submitting this plan |
| Date of Meeting | Improvement Goals |
| Number of issues to address | Performance Goals |
| Agreed review date | Date for improvements to be completed |
| Also send a copy of this PIP to the employee via email (checkbox) | Name |
Remember, you can completely customize either template to include additional fields and information. Once you’ve decided which one you want to use, click Use Template.
For our example, we’ll use the Performance Improvement Plan Form Template.
Once the pre-built form template loads, most of the work is done for you. You’ll find the fields for your template as we listed them above.
If you’d like, you can add additional fields to your form by dragging them from the left-hand panel to the right-hand panel.
Then, click on the field to make any changes. You can also click on a form field and drag it to rearrange the order on your performance improvement plan form.
When your form looks the way you want it to, click Save.
Step 2: Configure Your Form Settings
Once your performance improvement plan form looks the way you need it to, you can configure your form’s settings.
To start, go to Settings » General.
Here you can configure:
- Form Name — Rename your form here if you want to.
- Form Description — Give your form a description.
- Tags — You can apply tags to your site’s forms to help you organize them. This is especially helpful if your business has many online forms.
- Submit Button Text — Customize the copy on the submit button. In our example, we’ll change our submit button to something like “Submit PIP Form”.
- Submit Button Processing Text — Change the text that shows while the form is being submitted.
There are also several advanced settings you can configure by expanding the lower section of the page:
- Form CSS Class — Apply custom CSS to your form.
- Submit Button CSS Class — Apply custom CSS to your form’s submit button.
- Enable Prefill by URL — Automatically fill in some fields based on a custom URL.
- Enable AJAX form submission — Enable AJAX settings with no page reload.
- Disable storing entry information in WordPress — You can disable the storing of entry information and user details, such as IP addresses and user agents, in an effort to comply with GDPR requirements. In addition, check out our step-by-step instructions on how to add a GDPR agreement field to your simple contact form.
Next, move down to the Spam Protection and Security settings.
- Enable modern anti-spam protection — Stop contact form spam with the WPForms modern anti-spam protection. It runs in the background of your forms and can be toggled on or off on a case-by-case basis.
- Enable Akismet anti-spam protection — Connect your form to the Akismet plugin to prevent spam.
- Enable country filter — Block submissions from certain countries.
- Enable keyword filter — Prevent entries that include certain words or phrases.
When you’re done, click Save again.
Step 3: Configure Your Form Notifications
You can send a notification email when an employee submits their (PIP) performance improvement plan on your website.
Unless you disable this feature, whenever someone submits a performance improvement plan response on your site, you’ll get a notification about it.
If you use Smart Tags, you can also send a notification to the employee when they fill out the PIP form, letting them know you received their performance improvement plan, and you’ll be in contact shortly.
This assures your employees their forms have gone through. For help with this step, check out our documentation on how to set up form notifications in WordPress.
WPForms also lets you notify others when a performance improvement plan form is submitted for your company. For instance, you can send a notification to yourself, the person submitting the request and your:
- Supervisor
- Managers
- Other members of your HR team
- Administrative staff
You can also set these notifications to send conditionally, based on how your employee or manager fills out the PIP form. If you chose the Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) Form template, there’s already a conditional notification set up for you. It will go out if the manager selects the checkbox at the bottom of the form.
For help setting up multiple email notifications, check out our step-by-step tutorial on how to send multiple form notifications in WordPress.
Last, if you want to keep the branding of your emails consistent for your business, you can check out this guide on adding a custom header to your email template.
Step 4: Configure Your Form Confirmations
Form confirmations are messages that display to employees once they submit their responses to the performance improvement form.
They let the employee know that you’ve processed their form and offer you the chance to let them know what steps they must take next.
WPForms has 3 confirmation types to choose from:
- Message: This is the default confirmation type in WPForms. When an employee submits your form, a simple message will appear, letting them know their (PIP) Performance Improvement Plan online form was processed. Check out some great success messages to help boost user engagement.
- Show Page: This confirmation type will take employees to a specific web page on your site thanking them for submitting the performance improvement form or send them to another page where they can access other information. For help to do this, check out our tutorial on redirecting customers to a thank you page. Also, be sure to check out our article on creating effective Thank You pages.
- Go to URL (Redirect): This option is for when you want to send site visitors to a different website after they fill out the PIP form.
Let’s see how to set up a simple form confirmation in WPForms so you can customize the message your employees will see when they submit a performance improvement form for your review.
To start, click on the Confirmations tab in the form builder under Settings.
Then, customize the confirmation message to your liking and click Save.
For help with other confirmation types, see our documentation on setting up form confirmations.
Now, you’re ready to add your (PIP) Performance improvement plan so you can view it on your website.
Step 5: Add Your (PIP) Performance Improvement Plan Online Form to Your Website
Now that you’ve built your performance improvement plan form, you’ll need to add it to your WordPress website.
WPForms allows you to publish your forms in many locations on your website, including your blog posts, pages, and even sidebar widgets.
To begin, create a new page or post in WordPress, or go to the update settings on an existing one. After that, add a new block and select the WPForms block from the available options. You can search for it to find it more quickly.
The WPForms widget will then appear inside your block. Click on the dropdown and pick the PIP form you just built from the list.
The form you just built will appear in the WordPress editor.
Now, just publish your post or page so your (PIP) Performance improvement plan form appears on your website.
To view your PIP form entries after being submitted, check out this complete guide to form entries. You can view, search for, filter, print, and delete any of the entries, making performance improvement plans that much easier to administer.
Remember: if your employee eventually leaves your company, you can create an exit survey to get their feedback. This can help to avoid future pain points for your other team members.
Next, Build More Online Forms for Your Business
And that’s it! You now know how to make a (PIP) performance improvement plan online form on your WordPress website.
Got a big project coming up that may need changes? Check out our post on how to create a change request form in WordPress. You can also consider making a travel request form if your employees frequently need to claim travel expenses.
Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.
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