Development Plan

The best-laid plans are always subject to disruption, especially when outside parties, tight deadlines, and too many people are involved. When employees do not understand their jobs' connections to the organization's outcomes, sometimes managers have to redirect and refocus the employees.

This week's project will help us clean up a mess caused when an outside vendor and two internal employees dropped the ball on mailing an important package by a critical deadline.

To prepare for this Assignment, you will examine the "Missed Pickup Means a Missed Opportunity for 30 Seeking a Fellowship," provided in this week's resources. Then, you will prepare needs assessments to analyze two employees' current skill levels, and a gap analyses on what should have happened, and what did happen in the scenario.

Based on the needs assessment, you will address how to improve the performance of the mailroom specialist and the administrative assistant in their current jobs. Finally, you will create two performance improvement plans that outline for both employees their expected behaviors, metrics for improvement, steps they will take, consequences for not meeting the plan's expectations, and their managers' role, according to an established form.

Note that PIPs are a bit different from individual development plans (IDP), which are career management documents. Using an IDP, an employee creates a plan to develop skills over time, to prepare for new job opportunities, or promotions. Rarely are IDPs properly used to correct a missed step in work processes.

PIPs are used when mistakes happen that are so egregious that the manager needs to put the worker on notice that the behavior must stop; they give the employee a plan of action.

As HR manager, draft the PIPs, along with instructions to the manager on how he or she should conduct a meeting with the employees about improvements and consequences. Your paper should include the following:

Introduction, briefly summarizing what happened.

Needs assessment with gap analysis (for both employees).

PIPs for both employees (create two Appendices for these - Appendix A and B).

A set of instructions for the manager on what s/he should do to implement the PIPs.

No conclusion is required - this is a work-based document, parts of which will go into the employees' files.

Use the course resources to assist you with this paper. Include a reference and title page. Use APA.