How was she supposed to improve if she didn’t know about the plan personally?

Once your boss puts you on a Personalized Improvement Plan, you know your days at your company are numbered. Your boss might frame this game plan as if they’re trying to help you be a better employee, but that’s not true nearly 99.9% of the time. Your firing is a foregone conclusion, and they’re only putting you on this «plan» to «prove» that they tried to help you be «better» before they officially let you go. 

Even though it’s devastating to know that you’re going to get fired before it actually happens, there are a couple of things you can do to help yourself during that time of uncertainty. You should start your job search immediately, because you’ll need a new job when the 30 days are up. You can try your best with whatever the PIP entails, but you shouldn’t expect it to change how it ultimately shakes out. All you can really do is accept your fate and do what you can to not completely sever the relationships you had with everyone in your workplace, no matter how much you want to do so. 

You can’t go through the charade of trying to improve on a PIP if your manager hasn’t actually told you that you’re on one. That’s what happened to the employee in this story, and she’s struggling to make sense of the things they’re asking her to do over mail.