There is some rationale for this, as why tip an at-risk employee off to what is essentially a foregone conclusion?
Napkin math, if your salary is $100k/year - you are necessarily delivering at least $200k in revenue/value, so if you have a rough 6-month stretch, as an asset you are under water. At that point you are a liability and unless someone else can deliver on the other part of that expected $200k value, the opportunity cost is harming the company.
The point of a PIP is to create a paper trail to protect the company from incurring further costs and liability risk, so as a purely post-decision defensive strategy, it makes sense to not disclose it. The laws make it such that everyone has to sustain the fiction that a PIP is in earnest, which creates that creepy gaslighting feeling. The supreme irony is keeping it secret could mean a more personally honest and less psychologically harmful relationship for all involved.
Reality is, performance in most organizations is secondary to relationships in them (and perhaps credentials) because the reason a (profitable/long-lived) company makes money as a business is because it can operate at scale with interchangeable parts that get along, which means the marginal value of a high or low performer is not as significant to its bottom line as downside risks from a lack of cohesion, so the main thing you need to care about in an organization is your key relationships.
If your relationship with co-workers or managers is getting dicey, all you can do is "read the room," keep your CV updated, and your recruiter contacts warm, because unless you deliver some large multiple on performance (product breakthrough they need you to execute, or land a large client, etc), opinion-wise you're done there and it's time to move on.
Napkin math, if your salary is $100k/year - you are necessarily delivering at least $200k in revenue/value, so if you have a rough 6-month stretch, as an asset you are under water. At that point you are a liability and unless someone else can deliver on the other part of that expected $200k value, the opportunity cost is harming the company.
The point of a PIP is to create a paper trail to protect the company from incurring further costs and liability risk, so as a purely post-decision defensive strategy, it makes sense to not disclose it. The laws make it such that everyone has to sustain the fiction that a PIP is in earnest, which creates that creepy gaslighting feeling. The supreme irony is keeping it secret could mean a more personally honest and less psychologically harmful relationship for all involved.
Reality is, performance in most organizations is secondary to relationships in them (and perhaps credentials) because the reason a (profitable/long-lived) company makes money as a business is because it can operate at scale with interchangeable parts that get along, which means the marginal value of a high or low performer is not as significant to its bottom line as downside risks from a lack of cohesion, so the main thing you need to care about in an organization is your key relationships.
If your relationship with co-workers or managers is getting dicey, all you can do is "read the room," keep your CV updated, and your recruiter contacts warm, because unless you deliver some large multiple on performance (product breakthrough they need you to execute, or land a large client, etc), opinion-wise you're done there and it's time to move on.