Performance Improvement Plans in Belarus: What’s Actually Enforceable Under Local Labor Law

A US COO wrote to us a couple of months back with a two-line brief. Put Alexei on a 30-day PIP. Let us know when he’s out.

The reply took a while to draft, because we had to explain that his request didn’t mean what he thought. Nothing wrong with running a PIP in Belarus. It just doesn’t do what a PIP does in Texas or California.

Performance Improvement Plans are the default answer to underperformance across most US and UK companies. If you want the textbook version, SHRM’s writeup covers it: document the issues, give the employee 30 or 60 days to hit targets, dismiss if they miss. That works because the employment framework behind it allows for it.

Belarusian labor law doesn’t. Employer-initiated dismissal here runs through a closed list of grounds in the Labor Code, and “failed the PIP” is not on that list. That doesn’t mean you should never draft one — you should, sometimes, and there’s a section below on when. It does mean the PIP alone won’t get an employee out. The process that will has to be running alongside it.

What follows is the set of paths that actually work here, where a PIP genuinely helps, where it starts creating liability instead of reducing it, and how to run the whole thing without landing in front of a labor inspector. If you employ Belarusian workers through an EOR partner, all of this has to route through them regardless — they’re your employer of record on paper.

What a PIP is under Belarus law

A memo.

That’s the honest answer. There’s no article of the Labor Code that names a PIP. If an employee signs one and blows every target, their legal status doesn’t shift. Same if they refuse to sign at all. Nothing in the code hangs off it either way.

What does carry legal weight sits mostly in Article 42 of the Belarusian Labor Code. Two grounds there apply to underperformance cases: dismissal after a formal attestation concludes the employee doesn’t meet the job’s qualification requirements, and dismissal after a documented pattern of disciplinary violations. Neither of those is a PIP.

Foreign employers get pulled into a bad spot because both systems start from the same instinct — build a paper case, then let the person go. The trouble is that the paper has to be different paper, and the case has to be built under different rules. Follow the wrong ones and you’re buying yourself a reinstatement claim.

It’s the same pattern that catches companies off guard on sick leave in Belarus. The framework has its own accounting and its own vocabulary, and assuming the Western defaults just port over is where the money leaks out.

The four paths that actually work

Belarusian legislation allows for four acceptable escape pathways based on performance. Which one applies is determined by the specifics of your position, as well as the amount of time you have available.

Path 1: Formal attestation 

Attestation is what the Labor Code offers when you want to dismiss someone specifically because they can’t do the job. It’s the closest analogue in Belarusian law to what a Western manager thinks a PIP is for — even though the mechanics differ substantially.

Running it properly entails, first, getting a formal attestation regulation accepted in advance. That’s a standing document about how attestations work at your company, not something you draft the week you decide someone has to go. You form a commission of qualified reviewers. Notify the employee at least a month before the review. Assess against documented job requirements. Commission issues a written decision at the end.

If the commission concludes the person doesn’t meet the qualification requirements, dismissal under Article 42 becomes available. There’s one more step Western employers routinely forget: you have to first offer the employee any suitable alternative role in your company. Only if they refuse it, or nothing suitable exists, does the dismissal go through.

It takes real time. When the underperformance is genuinely about qualifications and you have runway to run it right, though, this is your cleanest available option.

Path 2: Disciplinary procedure

A lot of what companies label “underperformance” is actually disciplinary — missed deadlines, quality issues, unexplained absences, ignoring instructions. Which matters, because the Labor Code has a very specific procedure for discipline that it doesn’t have for “performance.”

You request a formal explanation from the employee regarding the specific incident. Review what they submit. Issue a formal command and have the employee sign for acknowledgment. If the pattern continues, repeat it. Multiple recorded violations within a twelve-month period may warrant dismissal under Article 42 for repeated failure to perform obligations.

For this to hold up, the incidents have to be real and on paper. Vague “she’s not really pulling her weight” won’t survive a court hearing. Three missed deadlines on three specific sprints with the written record for each — that’s a different conversation. Skip a step in the procedure and the whole chain gets weaker.

Path 3: Contract non-renewal

This one gets missed the most often. It’s also, in a lot of cases, the answer.

Most Belarusian employment runs on fixed-term contracts under what’s called employment contract — usually one to five years. If your employee is on one of those, you don’t need a PIP, an attestation, or a disciplinary chain. You notify the employee at least a month before the contract expires that it won’t be extended. No cause required. No severance beyond the statutory minimum. Employment ends when the contract does.

We’ve seen foreign employers spend three months building an attestation case for someone whose contract expires in four. The HR consulting side of what a decent EOR provider does is largely about noticing situations like that early enough to save you the effort.

Path 4: Mutual agreement (Article 37)

Both parties sign an agreement to end the employment, usually with a negotiated payout. Closes in days. Doesn’t require proving anything about performance.

The reason foreign employers underuse mutual agreement is that it feels like paying someone to leave, which is uncomfortable when you already have legal grounds for a different path. However, paying one to three months’ wages to settle a case quietly is nearly always less expensive than a full attestation runway, and it eliminates the potential of a reinstatement lawsuit that comes with any challenged dismissal. When we run the numbers with clients, mutual separation wins the cost-benefit analysis more often than not.

Where a PIP still earns its keep

None of the above means you shouldn’t run PIPs in Belarus. It means the PIP has to know its job. Used well, it does about five things:

• Formally puts the employee on notice about specific issues
• Sets objective, documented criteria that can then feed into a subsequent attestation
• Gives someone who could actually improve a genuine chance to do so — some do
• Sets up a mutual-separation conversation with concrete material to reference
• Creates a paper trail worth having if you ever land in front of a labor inspector

The PIP is one document among several that the overall process needs. Draft it accordingly — as documentation, not as a trigger for anything by itself

Where PIPs actively backfire

Five ways this goes wrong, from what we’ve seen.

Discriminatory-sounding language

Article 14 of the Labor Code prohibits discrimination on protected grounds, and the standard of proof for it in Belarusian courts is lower than most US employers assume. A sentence like “she’s not a culture fit for our younger team” belongs in nobody’s PIP, ever. ILO convention 111 sets the discrimination baseline that the Belarusian framework tracks with, and courts read those provisions expansively rather than narrowly.

Bad-faith targets

If a labor inspector or a court concludes that the PIP was written to fail — impossible metrics, deadlines nobody could hit, requirements not really connected to the actual job — that pattern supports a claim of unlawful pressure. The Ministry of Labour does investigate these when complaints come in. Keep the targets realistic and tied to what the job actually requires. Nothing exotic.

Isolation or pressure alongside the PIP

Taking the person out of meetings, reassigning them to menial tasks unrelated to their function, and applying informal pressure while the PIP is active. Courts consider the overall pattern, not just the PIP, and this is the pattern that likely to result in constructive dismissal verdicts.

English-only documents

If the document the employee signed wasn’t in Russian, its enforceability is thin. Fix is straightforward: bilingual, or translate the whole thing before you present it. The alternative is asking for trouble, hence the majority of respectable companies default to Russian.

PIP signed by the wrong company

If the client company drafts and signs the PIP but the EOR is the actual legal employer, the document is legally a note from a third party. It has no relationship to the employment. This is one of the specific issues our EOR vendor due diligence checklist covers — make sure the signature chain runs through whoever the employer of record actually is.

How to run this properly with an EOR

Rough sequence:

1. Talk to your EOR before you draft anything. They’re the legal employer under Belarusian law and every step has to route through them.
2. Pick the underlying legal path first — attestation, disciplinary, non-renewal, or mutual. The PIP supports whichever one you chose.
3. Everything is written in Russian. The employee signs the Russian version.
4. Objective and measurable criteria. Specific deliverables, numeric targets, defined dates. Avoid the terms “attitude,” “team fit,” and “communication style”.
5. Realistic timing. Thirty days rarely aligns with Belarusian notice periods or attestation lead time. Forty-five to sixty tends to work better.
6. Get signed acknowledgment on the document. If the employee refuses to sign, document the refusal with a witness — that itself is legally meaningful.
7. Interim reviews with actual written notes. These are structured checkpoints against the criteria, not casual “how’s it going” conversations.
8. At the end of the period, you run the legal procedure you chose in step 2. The PIP feeds into that procedure. But the procedure — not the PIP — is what actually ends the employment.

That’s the process side. CIPD’s guidance on performance management is a decent structural reference for the conversation itself, and the underlying principles translate reasonably well. The enforcement mechanics on the back end are what don’t.

Get the payroll side of the exit structured properly, too. Statutory severance calculations, accrued vacation payouts, negotiated additional compensation — a botched final settlement can reopen a case you thought was closed.

When to skip the PIP entirely

Some scenarios do not require one. If the contract expires within six months, plan for non-renewal and don’t build a paper trail you’ll never use. If the actual issue is disciplinary — fraud, harassment, safety violations, chronic absence — go straight to the disciplinary procedure rather than dressing it as performance. When the commercial relationship is already dead, skip the ceremony and open a mutual-separation conversation instead: one to three months of salary, closed in a week, done. And if the role itself is being eliminated, that’s redundancy under Article 42 point 1, which has a completely different procedure — notice periods, severance calculations, all of it different from performance dismissal. Running a PIP on someone whose role is being eliminated is just extra paperwork nobody needs.

FAQ

Is a PIP legally recognized in Belarus?

Not as a defined instrument. No article of the Labor Code names or regulates one. It’s an internal management tool. Attestation, disciplinary procedure, contract non-renewal, and mutual agreement are the four things the law actually recognizes.

Can I dismiss a Belarusian employee for failing a PIP?

Not directly. You can dismiss for insufficient qualification confirmed by formal attestation, or for repeated disciplinary violations processed through the Labor Code procedure. If your PIP fed into one of those paths, then yes, indirectly. If it stands alone, no.

Does the PIP need to be in Russian?

If you want it enforceable, yes. Bilingual works. English-only creates a real weakness in front of an inspector or a court.

How long should a PIP run?

Forty-five to sixty days is what actually works in practice. Thirty is often too short to line up with the parallel legal process. If you’re going past ninety, that’s usually a sign you should have opened the mutual-separation conversation weeks ago.

What’s the difference between attestation and a PIP?

Attestation is a Labor Code procedure with real legal effect. A qualified commission evaluates the employee formally against job requirements, following a written regulation, and its conclusion can support dismissal under Article 42. A PIP is an internal management document with no independent legal weight. You can use a PIP to prepare for attestation, but they’re not interchangeable.

Can we use mutual separation instead of running a PIP?

Very often, yes. One to three months of severance, closed in under a week, no reinstatement risk. Foreign employers reach for it last, but for the majority of cases the math actually favors doing it first.

Does the HTP special regime change any of this?

No. The HTP framework affects tax, residency, and IT-industry status. It doesn’t override Labor Code dismissal procedures. HTP residents follow the same rules on this as anyone else.

What if the employee refuses to sign the PIP?

The refusal itself is meaningful, but only if you document it properly. You need a written act of refusal, ideally witnessed by two other employees, dated, referencing the specific document. That said, refusal to sign doesn’t in itself create grounds for dismissal. It’s just one more piece in the overall file.

Closing

Most of the foreign employers we work with arrive expecting Belarus to operate like the countries their HR playbook was designed for. Belarus doesn’t. The Labor Code has its own procedural vocabulary, and running a Western PIP process while assuming it delivers a Western outcome is a specific and expensive way to get in trouble.

Draft the PIP if it’s genuinely going to help you — sometimes it will. Just don’t rely on it. Pick the underlying legal path before anyone starts writing.

If you’re looking at a specific Belarusian underperformance situation and want a 30-minute walkthrough of what’s actually available given your contract type and the specifics — no pitch, just a straight read — reach us through the eor.by contact page.