Slashdot Mirror
Fighting the Forced Ranking of Employees?
Allen asks: "The company I work for has a forced ranking system for performance reviews. Employees are ranked from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, in a bell curve arrangement. Department managers are required to identify: 10% as 5s (excels), 20% as 4's (exceeds), 50% as 3s (fully meets), 15% as 2s (partially meets), and 5% as 1s (requires action). In an department of 100 employees, this means that 5 employees must be identified and labeled as ones, and at least 20 employees as below average. The net result is every employee in the department is competing against their peers to increase (or maintain) their ranking. We're supposed to work together as a team, and support each other to get the product out the door, but the forced ranking system encourages us to instead stomp on each other, and stab each other in the back, in order to secure a higher ranking. That and, after working our collective rears off to get a new product out the door, several of us were given below average rankings that we believe are undeserved. How would you fight a forced ranking system at your job? I enjoy the technology I work on, and I enjoy working with my peers, but this forced ranking system is very demoralizing."
What company do you work for? Unisys has a 1-5 ranking system on a bell curve.
More than enough BS
Sounds like an academic department in a university. No where else is the competition so high for stakes that are so low. (source unknown) Heh.
-Sean
change jobs. your company's main competitor might be interested in you.
After all, 50% of the employees are below average at any given company. Might as well cut out the deadwood.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
So join 'em. You're going to have to learn the skills necessary to step all over your coworkers in order to claim your spot at the top. You can't beat the system, so you have to play by its rules, or walk out.
... one of the many many reasons I left.
Unionize and adopt a more preferable performance review structure as part of your bargained contract. It'll work wonders.
1. Start looking for a new job. That type of ranking system just leads to misery
2. Let someone in HR know how you feel, and how you think it will negatively affect the performance of your group as a team. Do this officially, in person.
3. Obtain new job, as HR will ignore you, because it was their crummy idea in the first place.
4. Write well thought out letter, addressed to your boss, CC'ing the HR department head, your department head, and the CFO, letting them know why you are leaving. Won't help you, but may help some of the poor schmucks that are still there.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Yeah, I have seen this as well - and all it leads to is employees 'hanging' each other and resentment when you get a crap mark in your review. I got an Average mark this year - again. When I protested this, I was told that I was doing the work expected of me. But I said, what of all the extra work I do outside of what you ask me to do? Oh, we expect you to do that............ I KNOW that I am a hard worker and do more than that average, and I do it good! I just give up at that point. I will be gone from the team in 90 days, that is the deadline I have set myself. I will go to another team or just leave for another job. They are getting plentiful again - honest!
So you are saying that out of a department of 100 employees you cannot find 5 who in retrospect were a mismatch, have lost interest, are underperforming due to unbeknownst-to-you problems at home, have taken up a crack cocaine habit, or other such?
It seems that we have found the first 1 in your group: you!
My company has long used a 1-5 scale (1 being the best here) for performance reviews. A year or two ago, I was talking to a friend (a manager in another area), and he told me that after telling his people what their numbers were, he was told by his management to lower them to fit the expected distribution. People weren't happy about that.
In my area, we have traditionally not had required distributions, so most people were 1s and 2s (or so I suspect--I only see my numbers). This year they told everyone to use the corporate standard distribution (or whatever they're calling it). Some managers did, and others didn't. The net result is that if your manager followed directions, you were hosed. Fortunately, they recognized that there was a problem and dropped all numbers from our department's performance reviews. So we got a happy outcome this year--they'll have to use the actual substance of our reviews to determine raises and promotions (or a dartboard).
Next year I expect it will be by the numbers.
Anyway, this is just one way that you find out from upper management how special the company thinks you are. Are you treated like a star athlete or a Walmart employee? And watch it shift as the job market changes.
[i]and at least 20 employees as below average.[/i]
At least 20 people are below average?
What kind of math is that?
OTOH, the "forced" rankings are, in my opinion, a good thing. It requires managers to not take the easy way out and just rank (relatively) poor performers as "average" and avoid confrontation. Also, it allows people to know where they stand within the company. The company I work for uses a system somewhat like the OP's, and though initially I was against it, after giving it some thought I think it's a good thing.
As for the backstabbing, etc. -- that is a problem that management needs to address. That sort of thing usually becomes pretty obvious after a short time and it shouldn't be tolerated. If those who are ranked lower than they want to be are given the support of management to address their areas of weakness, they can (and will) move up in ranking, unless everyone else does a better job of improving.
It is difficult for a large organization to fairly administer reviews (& the resulting raises or disciplary actions that should ensue). Doing this on a statistical basis is not unfair or inappropriate...if the sample size is big enough. The problem ensues when the ranking is pushed too far down the organization. 100 is probably big enough of a group, but minimally so. I'll bet the real issue here is that smaller groups are being forced to particpate (e.g. a manager of a group of 20 people within the 100 is being forced to pick 2 top performers and 1 bottom performer).
Your working for a bunch of A$$H0LES running the company who care more about being sadistic to its employees rather than focus on customer satisfacation.
Start looking for a new job and when you get one, get revenge by quiting on the spot with out notice and leave them hanging dry.
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
The company I currently work for has a rating system similar to the one you described. Recently, they started to enforce a quota for each of the rating categories because the vast majority of employees were being ranked as exceeding or far exceeding their manager's expectations. Now, I work with a stellar group of engineers, but if all of us are always exceeding our managers expectations, maybe they should raise their expectations.
When the quota system was introduced, we all bristled at the idea of being forced to participate. We have to get ranked on our teams (with anywhere from 3 to 10 people), ranked within our projects (10 to 100 people), and ranked within our department (~1000 people), although the department rankings are broken down into seniority groups. Frankly, its frightening because as the groups get larger and the managers further from the cube farm, its harder and harder to make decisions about who is doing good work, and who isn't. It also brings into question how it is that we demonstrate value to our management.
But after all of our moaning, we realized that what our managers were trying to do is establish some objective framework in which they could measure us against objective metrics. I would much rather have a manager be forced to rank me with my peers with a policy document in hand to help decide which of us is the most productive, rather than have him pick people to promote and give raises to without ANY objective metric or policy. I don't go out to bars with my boss, but I don't want that to effect my performance review.
My point is this - ranking systems are an attempt at objectively gauging the performance of individuals. Quota systems are in place so that managers don't opt out of the hard part of telling people that they aren't as productive as their peers. Its harsh, and it isn't flawless, but compared with the alternative of an entirely subjective promotions/raises process, I'll take the ranking.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
I'm sick and tired of people in the US winning about their job condition. Syndicate already!
but the forced ranking system encourages us to instead stomp on each other,
No matter how well they appear to cover their tracks, stompers get a reputation and no one trusts what they say. Including bosses.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
at least you still get to keep your stapler, right?
Why must the distribution be a normal distribution? Are the employees at the company random selections from the population at large? Of course not.
I would lobby to have the distribution changed. You're not dealing with random people. You're dealing with people that are mostly exceptional when compared to the overall population. You already have a biased sample. The distribution used should reflect this.
If your IT department is like the one I work in, around 40% of the people were hired during the boom days when IT employees were scarce, and employers would take just about anyone. They didn't have the ability or talent to do thier jobs then and they aren't any better today.
We have to many leftovers from the late 90s sitting around, doing little, and collecting paychecks while a small minority work hard to compensate.
Deal with it. The capitalist work place is competitive, and that's a good thing. You need to get rid of the dead wood to make room for more able people who might be unemployed now.
My company has such a curve system. I've always come out on top, because I work hard, get my job done right the first time, and on time. I constantly look for opportunities for improvement and I am STILL bored 75% of the time. I've recieved about 18% worth of raises (after the execs declared no raises for anyone) in the past 2 years. Oh, and our team just laid off or fired 3 people, because they weren't qualified for the position, never even tried to learn what they needed to know, or were just flat out useless.
As long as the competition if fair and everyone has an equal chance, then compete or die.
You cannot cry, bitch, piss, and moan your way to the top. Results matter as to how they impact the bottom line, everything else is Bullshit.
Give your boss a copy of The One Minute Manager on your way out the door.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
Really, no job is worth it. It's not like you're living in the Sahel. You're not going to starve. You're just going to regain a bit of human dignity. And there's about a 60/40 chance that the next job you get will pay more too.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Every large company I have worked at has done this to employees. Its useful for managers as a way to get employees that they dont like fired as useless. The employees that have kissed up to managers/supervisors always seem to get rated high even if they are totally useless.
Just call up a list of all the people who used to work for you, and tell HR they were 1s and 2s, so you "convinced" them to leave. All you have left now are 3s, 4s, and 5s.
Seriously, there is always a bell curve, but if there is someone on the bottom of it they are either someone you should fire, or, if you had kept all those incompetent to do the job, they would work out to 3s on the curve. That is the curve is skewed.
So, while all the capatalists prepare their ammo, let me explain briefly. The US has extremely labour-unfriendly laws. Depending on your state you have little protection against anything, including retrenchment, being fired without a reason, sexual harassment, poor working conditions, etc. The Free Market philosophy says that sooner or later a job becomes too unacceptable for anyone to do, and the employer has to improve the situation.
Problem is, in the race for the Almighty Buck, this just ain't true. There are too many people out there willing to make a lousy attempt at doing your job for half your salary and in worse conditions. And then there's India.
So the only way you're going to make headway into a solution to this problem, as opposed to an interim company-by-company work-around, is to take a more socialist approach to labour.
But that's just my 2c, and all your Slashdot-reading scholars, students and unemployed serial webophiles are welcome to disagree ;)
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
If the employees also got to rate each other on trustworthiness or teamwork, then the backstabbing would drop. It sound liek the current system rewards backstabbing. If you change the ranking mechanism so that screwing someone gets you a low rank, then you won't do it.
Ranking systems are not neccessarily bad, they just need to be designed to provide incentives for desirable behavior. If a company wants teamwork, then make that part of the ranking .
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A company that decides to treat half their employees below average is a company that is doomed to fail, especially if the value created by the company is mainly created by employees (i.e. software, services, etc).
I know that by definition that ~50% of employees will be below average, but what counts is performance of these employees against the industry average, not against their immediate peers. That's what counts in the market anyways...
I used to work at a large company that had this kind of scale, and yes every review cycle a couple people got screwed because managers had to fill quotas for each level.
However, I've also worked at small companies with no structured review system, and I found myself working much harder than my peers while getting no recognition.
So much of it depends on the management. If your manager is a metrics-whore and rates by #'s of tickets closed or something, then it will be a cut-throat environment. If you actually have a decent manager then he will be able to pick out those people who are genuine performers.
Look, retard: if you have 100 employees, 49 will be below average. If you can't name 20 that are below average, you're probably below average. In fact, you're probably in the bottom 5. If you don't like it, you could quit and explain that you don't like being ranked. I'm sure management will be happy you're leaving since they won't have to fire your sorry ass.
The forced quota system is especially bad in companies and industries where massive layoffs have been going on for the past few years.
Consider: when layoffs occur, for the most part (yes, I'm aware of politics and favortism) the ones who get laid off are the ones who would be 1's and 2's in a quota system. Obviously, that leaves behind all the 3's, 4's, and 5's who, even though they are doing the same job they have always been and possibly a lot more, will now be forced to be evaluated as 1's and 2's. A lot of folks with 4's and 5's will also be downgraded, despite the same superior quality of their work.
This system is unfair, de-motivating, and literally degrading.
It's a little more fair for upper management to give the supervisor a budget to be allocated for pay raises and bonuses. The supervisor then winds up ranking the employees and giving the higher-performing ones a larger slice of the budget. This doesn't work if the supervisor is playing political games, or has it "in" for an employee, but then again the 1-5 ranking scheme won't work in that case, either.
This is a company looking to eliminate staff. The whole concept that 5% of the staff "requires action" should be taken as an insult. The hiring manager is responsible for hiring people who can do the work. If a manager is doing his job, he should be taking care of any "problem" employees, as the problems come to light. The only way a company could have 5% dead heads is if management isn't doing it's job. So, the only reasonable view that 5% of the staff must be imcompetent, is that 5% of the staff will be let go soon after appraisals. Most staff should get a 3 or a 4, exceptional cases should get 2's or 5's. Next to no one should be a 1.
Does anyone ever think they deserve a poor ranking?
For great justice.
And after everyone thinks you're the smartest one around propose to stop with the rating system.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Leaving is the simple solution - find a nice job somewhere that they don't care how you perform, the problem is that loosers and slackers will tend to hang out there
Game the systems: Figure out how you will be rated, and maximize your value to the management team. Bring your concerns about how other people are gaming the system. It turns out in environments I have been in with Ranking systems - the review feedback on backstabbers has not been very good, and people that genuinely help their team mates tend to do very well. YMMV depending on your manager.
I will also say that it is very important for you to trust your first line manager in this environment - they will be defending the rating that you get and are responsible for getting you bumped up, or having some other manager have you bumped down. It turns out that the managers are much more competetive in this environment than the employees ever will be (you ever seen two managers get into fisty cuffs with several managers trying to seperate them after a heated discussion on who's employee is better ?)
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
The company I work for uses a similar rating system, but requires peer reviews to be supplied to your manager to be rolled into your official review. Normally, each person writes 2-3 reviews for his peers / managers, and they have 2-3 peers write reviews for them. This means that a large part of your official review is how much you helped other team members. It's kind of a pain in the ass during review period, but it tends to almost completely eliminate the backstabbing described in the original post.
Dan
It's shameful that a company would use a system that forces 20% of employees to be ranked below average. Instead, I propose the following:
10% of employees are ranked as among the top 1%
25% are ranked from 1-10%
35% ranked from 11-25%
25% ranked from 26-50%
5% are ranked below average.
I'll refer to the above scale as the Modified Woebegone System (in Lake Woebegone, of course, all the children are above average).
- Attitude - This is very important. You must have a positive attitude about the company and your work. Let everyone know that you are excited about the company and moving up the ladder within the company. Never be satisfied with what you have, always want more.
- Your Boss - You have to find out from your boss what it takes to get a top rating. Have a one on one meeting with your boss and let your boss know that you really want a top rating. Get them to tell you what steps you need to take. Follow up and make sure you are on the right track throughout the year.
- Documentation - You can't count on your boss to document your progress so do it yourself. Keep track of every project you are on and every class you take that can help you in your job.
- Projects - Get involved in projects any way you can. Your company probably has Six Sigma or BPI. Take advantage of these opportunities. If you see something that needs improvement, write up a proposal and sumbit it to you boss or whoever is in charge of such things.
- Flexibility - This not only means being willing to work overtime, but it means working out of your area as well. Look for opportunities to cross-train in other areas. Be willing to take on additional responsibility for no additional pay. Be eager to learn.
- Be an Expert - Become an expert in your job. Even if your job is nothing but cleaning toilets, know everything about it.
- Be a Team Player - Customers aren't just the poeple at home using your product, your teammates are also your customers. Find out what you can do to make other people's jobs easier down the line. Never say "That's not my job." Be willing to help anyone.
- Do Things by the Book - Always try to follow company policies and processes.
- Accept Responsibility - If you mess up, don't be afraid to admit responsibility. Apologize for messing up and ask what you can do to fix the problem to make sure it doesn't happen again.
You don't have to stab people in the back to get a good rating, but remember that no one else is going to help you. You are the one who is ultimately responsible for your rating. Don't let others discourage you either. If someone calls you a "company man" or brown noser, just smile and shrug. Also remember that showing up every day and doing your job well is what they expect you to do. While this is admirable it will only get you and average rating. You have to go above and beyond to get that top rating. I know you can do it so get after it!Smeghead every day of the week.
The answer to employee backstabbing is simple: focus that instinct on the goddamn competition.
Encouraging employees to view each other as the competition is so stupid I hardly know where to begin. Just because something is a number doesn't automatically make it objective, especially if the numbers are force fit with a hammer to distribute along a gaussian curve for each department. Take a real objective number, say height, and measure the employees. You will never see anything that resembles a bell curve unless you have something like hundreds people in the unit. A bell curve is simply the curve which on average has the best fit -- the actual curves never match by inspection unless n is very large or you are measuring a feature with tiny variance.
Managing by numbers is good -- but not by any numbers. Only somebody with an incredibly shallow grasp of numbers would rate people this way. But I think there is a better way.
Imagine you have a football team, in which nobody gets to know the score, what quarter or down it is, how much yardage to goal and first down, or anything about the other team other than the color of their jerseys. But they do have a number assigned to them by their coach bsaed on how well he thinks they executed the play he called. How well do you think that team would play?
That's pretty much the situation for workers in American business.
If you want to manage by numbers, then why not teach employees how to keep score? Why not teach them how to read the financial statements and projections, and explain to them how their departmental and personal performance ties into meeting the company's objectives? How the competition stacks up, what their strengths and vulnerabilities are? I think that what's behind the "they don't need to know the numbers" attitude is a fear of bad news. As a manager, I think you should never run from bad news, but face it and improve upon the situation as much as you can. If the company is doing bad, the employees (at least the ones I'd hire) will figure it out, and rumors are always worse than news. If they understand and are engaged in the company's strategy then they can help the company respond to challenges.
As far as the deadwood is concerned, I think it's easier under my system to clear it out. Instead of being forced to assign somebody a low number, I simply say that due to whatever reason you Mr. Employee aren't contributing to our departmental/corporate goals. He may be the greatest employee ever, but we just don't need what he does, or he may simply not be doing his job -- it doesn't matter. We can plan to either change his contribution to the company or transition him out. Except in cases of gross irresponsibility, the employee can leave with his head held high instead of going out the door painted with the scarlet letter.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've been on both sides of this issue. I don't understand how techies can argue against the fact that half of their team is below average *for the team*.
Many posters have claimed that management is not doing their job if there are people at the bottom. But relative to others, there are always people at the bottom. Forced ranking seems to be the only way for a middle manager to get a picture of who needs work and to get the line manager to acknowledge it.
This forced ranking was popularized by the GE management book a while back, where people were ranked A/B/C with a breakdown of 10/80/10 percent.
Being in the 10% of C's doesn't mean you get fired, it is a tool for management to decide who to focus on. The correct solution might simply be to move to a different group or position better suited to the persons skills or interests. Or it might mean more training. Or yes it might mean they will be put on a performance plan to make managements expectations clear, possibly leading to termination.
Such need not be public. The forced rankings can be divorced from annual review ranks, where someone could receive a meets expectations and still be a C. It could be managements job to figure out how to make this merely good employee be great.
For example, you might have a developer who writes good code, but who is very slow because they don't use tools to automate there work. I've seen this a lot. Getting a traditionally IDE oriented developer to learn to use command line tools, perl, or a decent editor with macros can increase their productivity. You wouldn't just fire them off the bat because they aren't as good as your other developers.
a) They don't trust their managers to do the hard job of making honest assessments.
b) They assume there are lurking low performers that have to be rooted out and elimininated.
c) They treat people as standard "parts".
Really, how long do you want to work for people who think like that?
You can generally not change a bad work situation - put that place behind you
With my manager, we call it a "love hate relationship". He is pretty tough, and we hate him 364 days a year, but on the 365'th day (the day reviews come out) we worship the water he walks on.
I think this is a good process, mostly becuase I've always had tough managers that fight for me in ranking. Exectuives must remember to score the managers on the average of their subordinates scores. Those with poorer ranking subrodinates either are not managing the subordinates, the workload, or are not scoring/supporting the subordinates correctly. After all, individuals classified by work groups should be equals in performance.
Half of the managers are below average too.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
I used to work for a company with a policy (a quiet one mind you, but I was a manager) of every year identifying the bottom 5% of the employees and laying them off. This wasn't just forced rating distributions - sorry, you rated low this year - you are gone. And 5% was expected to be identified every year.
I don't work there anymore...and I wouldn't work in the environment you talk about either unless I simply had no choice.
Obviously there are WAY too many people too high up in corporate America with ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE how to motivate and manage people.
The heights of genius are only measurable by the depths of stupidity
Perhaps if Miller Huggins, manager of the Yankees during the Ruth era, had used such formulaic nonsense us Boston fans would be talking about the Red Sox dynasty.
If you're a manager, it seems to me the real question when evaluating an employee is this: if I were to replace this person, would I be likely to find a replacement (for the same $$) who is better, the same, or worse than what I have now. If worse, obviously it makes no sense to replace; if the same, replacement is not warranted because of retraining costs and other costs associated with turnover. If you are pretty sure you'd wind up with a better worker, you should make the move.
If you're fortunate to have players like Ruth and Gehrig playing for you, setting an average standard based on extraordinary performance will likely lead to the release of players who will not be replaced by players of equal value.
Plus, talk about a toxic work environment.
The problem is not the ranking system, but that you care about it. It has no inherent validity except that which is created by your concern over it. The workers' response to the system is what makes it work.
Firings will continue until moral improves. Those with the lowest moral will be fired first, as to more significantly increase the average moral rating.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I have to deal with a similar ranking.
I realize this is not for everyone, but I solve the problem through apathy. Regardless of my rating, I do the best job that I can on any task that I am assigned.
When I was actually in the middle of a business embroglio but remained steadfast in my particular conviction I was told "this will not look good on your performance review" I used a line that I'd been waiting for years to say in just this situation:
"The only way you can hurt me with a performance review is to roll it up and poke me in the eye"
I've been at this job 22 years, and fully expect to be here for many to come (by choice).
I wrote software for a system like this once, but there was a few SLIGHT changes
.com boom)
The company had an OBJECTIVE way to measure the perfomance of each office or unit (proffit/loss - the bottom line) - if you were in a support group, like IS/IT, your departments rating was the SAME as the group(s) you supported - aka, your DEPARTMENTS rating was going to be a 1-5
Now, here's the important part - EVERYONE in the department starts the review off with the AVERAGE review of the department - aka, your department was a 3, everyone starts off at a 3, your department was a 4, everyone starts at a 4!
Your manager could then increase/decrease each person's review by 1 point, however, the AVERAGE of the department could NOT change. So, if you bumped a person UP from, say 3 to 4 (higher was better), you had to DROP someone from a 3 to a 2
Then inside each ranking, you had
1)Job category
and
2)Position in pay scale for that category
You were either "Underpaid", "Average" or "Overpaid" (MY terms, not theirs) Your raise amount differed by which bracket you were in - a 4 who was in the bottom bracket could expect a much better raise than a 4 who was in top bracket. A 2 in the middle or top had better not be expecting a raise - they weren't getting one, where a bottom 2 MIGHT. The 1s? At BEST they were getting warning notes, if not a pink slip
I traveled around the country with the HR folks installing the review database and data. Security was VERY tight. How tight? The server where this would be installed had ALL it's passwords LOCKED OUT, including all Admin passwords, except for MINE, and that was a random password generated at Home office. During the 1-2 days that the database existed on that server, it was NOT backed up, it was NOT in production, it was ONLY on the local segement, and ONLY the managers were allowed on a PC on that segment
It was an "interesting" time - when we walked into the office for "review time" you could SEE the sweat - the GOOD news is that almost all units were 3+. ONCE, and ONLY once did I walk into a field office that was rated a 2, and that was mostly because there were 2 departments that were rated 1 in the building. Let's put it this way - it was NOT pretty for those 2 departments - out of about 20 employees in those departments, I think 5 were left the next day. The FUN days were when you walked into a field office that was a 4 or 5. Those offices 1)Had their act together, and 2)Usually had enough of a clue to KNOW it - there was no sweat, and when we left at the end of 2 days, everyone was happy (10% raises were common for "average paid" line folks (more for lower paid), and this was before the
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I have seen this kind of thing before. I bet that your raises and/or other compensation are based upon your score. This kind of system is used to increase losses to attrition without actually laying off people. Additionaly, it saves money in compensation and removes the more ambitious element. This makes the remaining staff more compliant.
I may be wrong, but my experience tells me that you should get out if you can. It is often an indication of a failing business.
F X=0:1:9999 F D=2:1 Q:((X>2)&(X#D=0)!((D>X/2)&(X'=1))) I D>(X/2) W:$X>75 ! W X,?$X+5-$l(X) Q
You know what i'd do? If every floor-grunt in your company is really unhappy with the rating system... the first thing to do is to find a big piece of paper. Then find a big black marker and write a GIANT fucking "1" on it. Then have everyone in sight sign the paper. Then march into the office of the highest ranking suit on the ladder that you can reach, and tell them "this is what WE think of your fucking ranking system". Insert/remove expletives and threats as nessecary.
;)), because we're utilizing individuals' strengths in specific areas to further the team and project.
Because really... A bell curve for ranking your employees? How retarded is that?! "Oh but but but I'm a smrt geek an teh lawys of matehmantics staet that 49% of emplyobees are UNDAR AVERAGAE!!" Under WHAT average? Averages are fine and dandy, but you've got to explicitly define the criteria in the first place. And unless you work at a plant where everyones job is to put lids on pails... those 'critera' aren't easy to write down. Now I don't know about the rest of you, but where I work there are about 5 different jobs split among 10 people (we're the small shift that gets shit on for everything. Yeah, you know the ones). If I suck royal at 4 of those jobs, but am the best employee in the company at the 5th... doesn't that, statistically, make me "below average"? Does that mean I should be fired or otherwise punished? Fuck no! It just means that management needs to get off their lazy asses and identify their employees as PEOPLE rather than NUMBERS. Hell, even within a set task, there's often room for multiple positions and personalities. Myself, I generally work with one or two other people within my usual task. This task requires (overall) a great deal of organization and foresight, and I just happen to be more skilled in those areas than my coworkers. BUT, my coworkers are generally more capable of doing the physical job. So what happens? Simple, we take roles. I organize and lay out a plan, and then try to keep up with my coworker as we actually get the job done. It works fantastic (relatively speaking
Above average. Below average. Thats all bullshit so HR and the suits can spend more time playing golf. I can't really blame them... looking at a chart and going "fire these 1 rated people" is a LOT easier than actually having to think about cutting "mike, sally, and bob, because they aren't fulfilling their roles". But I ask you - which is more responsible? Which method is a greater benefit to the company? You know the answer. So do like I said - do your duty to the company. Get out that piece of paper and a marker, and give that asinine "bell curve" a big fat fucking 1.
IBM has completely changed the performance assessment process this year. Managers no longer have fixed allocations of each grade to hand out. If anyone at IBM is reading this and hasn't heard about the new system, ask your manager.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Here's the problem with the whole "below average for the team" concept. What happens if you have 5 people in a team and every one of them is highly knowledgeable, works 60 hours per week and produces top quality work? One of them is going to be ranked as needing to be disciplined because they are the worst out of the 5. It doesn't matter that they may be in the top 5% of the industry and a workaholic. They still get screwed because of the preconceived notion that a statistical curve exists. I have yet to work anywhere that comes even close to meeting the curve. I've worked with largely lazy groups, where a curve would over-rate most a good portion of them. I've also worked with excellent groups of people where a large portion would be under-rated. If supervisors can't handle the pressure of firing bad employees and keep letting them coast, perhaps it's time for the supervisor to be let go.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
because of course the rankings are ensured to be objective. It will never be a matter of who goes out for beer with whom.
No matter how well they appear to cover their tracks, stompers get a reputation and no one trusts what they say. Including bosses.
that sounds really naive to me.
-pyrrho
Acutally, where I work management is very good about sharing with us the kind of numbers you speak of.
Good.
Again, I agree with most of the things you posted -- I just don't see them as any sort of argument against a ranking system of evaluation.
Well, ranking is very different animal from scoring which in turn is very different from scoring according to a predefined curve, which is often the next thing that happens after single number scoring is introduced.
Any good manager has his reports ranked -- it's critical. At any moment I know if disaster strikes, who the weak link is, and who has to be preserved. I keep this information close to my vest unless disaster is looming, in which case I will give the weak link heads up so he's not caught unawares. It doesn't do anybody any good to know what their rank is, and more to the point it doesn't do my employer any good. Also note that this rank is not a measure of the employee's talent, attitude, or virtuousness, but simply a ranking of the impact of the loss of that person on the team. I once worked with a guy who was by objective measures the weakest link -- least intelligent, least industrious, least knowledgeable. And this was in an outfit full of bright, knowledgeable, hard driving people. He turned out to be very important because he was the only person who didn't scare crap out of the customers. Mind you the other guys were respected, just that they didn't make normal people feel at ease. If I had been his manager, I'd have ranked him ahead of the more deserving employees, because he brought someting to the team that was missing. That's what capitalism is about: it's not rewarding virtue, its efficiently using resources.
Measurements are of course useful, if you have several good ones to work with. But you have to be aware of some simple facts about measurements. First, as pointed out above, in small to medium sample sizes, parameters like performance or height that vary widely will never fit a bell curve by inspection. Also: no one measure can tell it all. Trying to boil down a person to a single number is really a form of laziness: I don't want to think about how to use this person most effectively, just give me a number. Having a battery of scores on which an employee could be described would be useful, if you (A) had the instruments to measure these dimensions, and (B) still had latitude for judgement. Lacking good instruments for measuring these qualities, employees can still be evaluated using qualitiative judgements in these areas.
Measurements that are forced to fit a curve are completely worthless. In such a system employees are not being measured, they are being sorted into ranked pigeonholes and then this rank is being treated as statistically rational data. These scores are presumably compared across departments, which is pure malarky, one step down the ladder of statistical meaninglessness from adding up eye color. The practical example of this is two managers, one with a team that is composed of the best employees in the company, the other which is is composed of the worst. By "grading on a curve", we have made the two teams look identical, whereas we'd be better off dropping everyone on team B than losing a single member of team A.
Forcing each manager to fit his employees to any predefined curve is antithetical to the very concept of measurement. It's the ultimate laziness: give me a number -- but don't give me the real one, give me one that suits my needs.
That said, it's perfectly understandable why higher ups should wish for such a system. If it worked, it would be possible to make staffing decisions based on a simple arithmetical formula, and eliminate the need for judgements to be made at any level of management above the direct supervisor. In fact such a system would be too good, since you could replace managers with spreadsheets.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A long, long time ago, I was just starting out in consulting. So dewy-eyed and innocent... The company used this forced ranking system, and I had great reviews before. Despite getting billed out at a much better rate than my peers and getting the same pay scale, learning new skills on my own so they can pitch me to these higher margin accounts, and doing everything some of the posters here talk about, one year I got a resoundingly bad review. Not just "below average", but sewage stinking bad. It was so bad, I thought I was fired when I read it.
The clue by four I got that this was just because my managers felt my record was good enough that it could absorb the hit so that they could fluff up someone else was because they never got back to me what, exactly, could I do to improve. Not immediately after, not the week after during a one-on-one meeting, not in followups two, three, four, six, eight and twelve weeks after. In the one-on-one meeting, when asked to share specifics of just one particularly egregious episode he literally answered, "I don't know, I'll get back to you on that." So I buckled down, got more serious about learning the business (all aspects, not just the technical side), and worked my ass off for the next 11 months, mostly filling in my sales and marketing gaps. The next review period came, I jumped ship for another firm (where I got nothing but stellar reviews, backed up by huge compensation plan increases that tripled what I used to get within three years, and in the depths of the IT recession back in 2001 one quarter was the only consultant that received a raise in the company), and haven't looked back since.
The clincher that proved to me it wasn't me, but managers playing political games, with my career as the hapless ball? My client manager invited me into his office upon hearing I had given two weeks notice, closed the door, and asked me if there was anything he could do to keep me working for him. When I demurred and said I didn't want to be involved in a potential lawsuit, he said, "Fuck 'em, you're worth it and besides, they wouldn't dare if I told them to lay off." I didn't take him up on the offer by the way; told him that if there were any issues arising from the transition that I would be happy to help his team solve them, gratis, and that the bad blood might get in the way of doing the work efficiently anyways (sandbagging in ways that were impossible to prove, and other subtle forms of retribution that were better to avoid, no matter how much the client was willing to pay).
I learned later that my company was minting money with my work, and the senior managers were as mystified as I was by my low marks, but the company was expanding and they let the local managers call the the shots. Especially since I was still working and minting a minor fortune for them, it was easy to just let it slide. Then the executive management got pissed when they found out I left because as far as I was concerned, my stint was over as soon as it became clear that my direct managers were never going to give me a reason for or a way to avoid the low marks. They lost a noticeable chunk of business on the project when I walked out the door. A lot of people got yelled at that day. The best part? I would have never become as mercenary as I am today, demanding and getting top dollar, if they had just assigned "average" marks and a 3% pay raise. Today, I thank that horrible review for leading to a very comfortable life for me.
Moral of the story? If you are brutally objective about yourself, and you know that you are worth more, then check your six and get the hell out.
It has been said here before by others, and I'll repeat it again. As a techie, you have far more power in the marketplace than most of you realize. But you have to learn sales, marketing, accounting, leadership, and social skills. Otherwise, you are not only paying top dollar for those skills to be represented by others, those others are going to wield power over your future as your managers. And trust me, t
From reading some of the top-rated posts, it seems there is a misunderstanding in what he is saying. I don't think he's saying that being rated is bad, but that being rated relative to your co-workers (bell curve) is bad. This is especially bad for small groups. I fall under a similar rating, with the difference that I'm rated against expectations. I have some control in managing those expectations, and have fairly clear guidelines for the rest of them. So, as long as I meet the expectations set for me, I get average or better reviews. The nice thing is, we have a great team of individuals, none of whom I would rate as below-average.
That should be the goal of management: capable individuals striving to meet well-defined goals as part of a superior team. With the bell curve, that is a goal that is never attainable. And if you start getting close, you'll have employees looking elsewhere, and realizing that they can leave for somewhere else that will appreciate them for their current skills and less stress for them.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Lots of companies rank employees on a given scale. The one I work for now does this and I don't mind it - IMO it's a company's duty to try to evaluate performance. Of course I always rank very highly :)
:)
However another company I used to for ranked employees relative to each other. The resulting list was broken into thirds, and depending on where you were in the list, either your exact place was made common knowledge or you were just told what third you were in. Here's the clincher: in some departments (sales as I recall), the entire bottom third was eliminated each year. Talk about draconian.
Needless to say, I didn't hang around there too long. Well, I guess four years is too long
Read my keyboard review.
I've never seen any system that tries to rank employees contribute to anything except turnover. Either the person is right for the job or they're not. Either they have some skills worth keeping or you can live without them. That's simple enough even the HR department can follow it.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"If you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair like your pretty boy over there Brian, why don't you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?"
Simple as that.
You didn't sign up to be a backstabbing weasel, you signed up to code WAP servlets (or some other demeaning task in the wastebasket-dumping layers of power).
They're asking you to do more than they're paying you for, by having you fight amongst yourselves for their amusement.
So fuck 'em.
It costs about half your pay to replace you. If enough people quit, they'll realize they should just pay everyone 50% more and stop using them for managerial bloodsport.
The company I work for has a forced ranking system too. A few weeks after each quarter closes, we get to find out where we stand. It's a nice binary threshold though, so it doesn't matter if you're on top, just as long as you're above enough people.
How would you fight a forced ranking system at your job?
Quit. Let a real man take your job.
how about judging people against the tasks they are given, firing them when they perfrom incompetantly on them.
Annual rankings are not to find out who you fire this year!
This system isn't perfect, but it at least makes some attempt to be objective and consistent. Before this system came in, performance was managed through subjective impressions of managers, and was almost certainly less fair and more prone to grand-standing, networking/nepotism, and backstabbing than the current one.
I am reminded of this Winston Churchill quote :
David.
What happens if you get a 1? Are you demoted, get your pay cut, or otherwise
penalized? Or does your boss have to write some helpful suggestions on your
review explaining things you can do to improve? In the former case, I'd be
probably looking for ways to enhance my resume, but in the latter case I'd
just ignore the ranking system entirely. (In my present job, we have annual
employee reviews, but the only time I think about them is when I'm in the
boss's office having my review. The rest of the time I just worry about doing
my job.) Stuff like this can only demoralize you if you fret over it.
But yeah, if a low ranking has ramifications that matter, like demotion, then
you should probably start looking for another job. Start looking now, because
it can take a while to find one these days.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I wonder if it's the case where many slashdotters are getting out of college and are working at their first job in the real world, or if they are former .com employees trying to adjust to a regular business environment, especially a large corporate one.
If you look at it from the business' viewpoint, the reason why they do the point rankings or some other standardized performance ranking is to simplify things and to provide a documented process that includes a lengthy paper trail for when they get sued or get brought up on civil rights abuses by the govt for running a 'good ole boys network'. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter. This will happen to any company of significant size because there will always be at least one person that will scream that they were discriminated against even though they were terminated for poor performance. They need to demonstrate that there was a uniform, impartial process in place to counter this. Start-ups probably don't care about any of this because they want to reward their achievers who are fueling the growth. This behavior continues until they become big and/or until they fire the wrong person.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
This isn't Geac, is it?
Worst fucking company you could ever work for!
My company has the same review system. My advice is that it's a cruel world so adapt yourself. I once did good engineering work for this company. Not anymore. 50% of my day now is spent 'gaming' the system. I have 5 employees working their asses off for me of who's work I am taking credit for. I am going to lay one off soon. It's not that I don't like the guy or think he's not doing a good job. He's doing a great job. However it's simply time to give this team an enema. The employee in question will be fired in a meeting to maximise the shock value to the other troops.
Wrong! You are making an easy mathematical error, but fortunately it is easy to understand your error if you are willing to think about statistics for a moment.
"(T)he fact that half of their team is below average *for the team" is not a fact, and it is actually extremely unlikely for any team. The "normal distribution" applies (when it does) to very large samples. The smaller the group, the less applicable the normal distribution is. This is one reason why "grading on a curve" is absurd in anything but huge classes, and arguable even there.
Even your minimal claim has simple counterexamples, eg: You've got six people on a team. Five are ordinary and indistinguishable in ability. One is great. In that case, Five are below average. While extreme, this is only a simple case. If you look at likely cases, most of them don't divide neatly in two, neither do they fit a normal distribution, which the GE example approximates with three values instead of two.
The number of people one manager rates is small enough that the normal distribution will almost certainly not apply.
If you have trouble with this, sit down with a coin and flip it, graphing as you go. Even with exactly two integer options, the distribution will not be 50/50 for quite for some time, although the longer you flip, the more those discrepancies will vanish into the noise.
Hell, I'll write a script using a RNG to demonstrate it. I've argued this before. I'm only bothering now, because in your case it is important.
Another example that will obviously violate your expectations. Imagine a task that is easy to do to a certain level of ability, and improvement after that point is very slow and difficult to distinguish. Imagine also that the ramp up speed is fairly fast, but before that point, performance is simply inadequate. Now imagine a team where most folks have been doing this for long enough to be good enough. Maybe a few are better, but not by much. Now there is one new guy who is utterly incompetent. Once again, most are above average. Again, this is an extreme example, but not an uncommon one at most workplaces.
If this isn't what you mean by "average" you shouldn't use mathematical terms, and if you want to define a midpoint that isn't "average," you need a statistics course before you'd better inflict it upon other people. Forcing data to match an arbitrary curve is dishonest or ignorant.
Your methods are unquestionably screwing many of your employees. This is math, not opinion, even if you regard evaluations as arbitrary, which again, they'd better not be. As a manager, you really need to understand how wrong you are. This is logic worthy only of the true PHB.
Your example isn't even the same as the GE example. If you have an odd number, then obviously half are not below average, so your simple rule is already broken in at least half of the possible cases. This doesn't apply to the more complex (although equally wrong for other reasons above) GE example you cite. Nonetheless, your claim is demonstrably different from the GE example, and you should be able to tell the difference. In the GE example, people will be clustered at the 80% point, and thus, only ten percent will be below average.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
It's funny that this story should be posted. I was just given a very similar review just yesterday, though without the important aspect of forced groupings. But I am so annoyed with mine -- because it left out such important factors as the fact that I've stayed late/worked a double/filled shifts every time I was asked with one exception -- that I am strongly considering getting everyone to anonymously rate the company I work for.
...or heck, maybe both! When a complaint is made about the fact that some department has to be rated a "1," ...well, you can just sort of shrug and say "hey, it was your idea."
You could do something similar. Form your own questionare but have the targets be either individual suits, individual departments
Of course, they will get to hem and haw about the results but have no standing at all to change the results. Then publish them. Hm. I think I'm on to a new website idea...
You can expect to be fired, of course. Just have something lined up. I can't imagine that McDonalds would be much worse than such a dumbass system...
My
Limekiller
Besides all the basic arguments about the validity of ranking people at all or making it fit a bell curve...
They're not even asking managers to put 10% in "catagory A". They're forcing them to redefine what happened. The expectations were set. N% excelled, M% exceeded, etc. These are facts. You can't just force them to other percentages. By forcing the curve you redefine reality.
Tell someone they're in the lowest 10% if you have to, but don't tell them they didn't meet expectations if they did.
Actually, in English the word is "Unionise".
Only in American would anyone use "Unionize".
L
The big problem I see with this is that employees will have to become ass-kissers and make sure they tell management everything good that they do. The guy who quietly does his work unnoticed will probably get screwed in the ranking system. At the same time, it really is true that 50% of the workers are below average. How does the company handle the people who get 1's? Are they fired pretty quickly, or are they given some mercy, especially of the company or department as a whole is doing very well? I'm a big softie, and if I was a manager who had to evaluate employees, i'd most likely give most of them good raitings, but some other manager might want to look tough and give his employees poor raitings, especially if his department is doing poorly and he wants to transfer the blame off of himself. Forced rankings like that would give some consistancy in the rankings between different departments or shifts, which is probaly a good thing, especially if a company is planning layoffs. Without it, you could be in a lot more likely to be laid off if you have the tough boss.
I think the slippery slope began when "personnel" departments got renamed as "human resources".
Hernan Cortez, the conqueror of the Aztec Empire, burned all his ships to ensure nobody could be tempted to abandon the enterprise and return to Cuba.
As they say , the rest is history.
Sometimes it is indispensable to burn bridges, the world is small, but it is not that small.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Not that the reasons were related.
A bunch of us, I worked in the R&D side, put together arguments against the ranking system, probably similar to those you have, and presented them. While there was no backlash, it was clear that management was NOT changing their minds, regardless of the statistical information presented. They couldn't accept that the smart people that worked for them knew more about statistics then the expensive consulting agency that sold them on the plan.
Suggestion: Give it up 'cause you ain't changing it. Executives are by nature stupid people. They can't help, the jobs forces them to be that way.
"Meets expectations" and "Does not meet expectations".
/. instead of working)
Needless to say, employees evaluations are a joke here. I bet 99.99% of the employees here receive "Meets" - especially if they've worked to keep the expectations about their work low... (said the guy who's posting on
I guess it's better than the forced 5-level system described, though, because no one has to be fired.
--RJ
(this of course being the same management who had people in the office over millenium night but refused to let them hand over to the people doing oncall from 8am the next morning as that would be a call out so would cost them overtime money, (despite the fact that the people involved said they wanted a handover and wouldnt claim and in the end did it anyway)).
Be interesting to see what happens at the end of this year, its now the end of March and my new incompetent boss still hasnt managed to set any objectives for any of us, (which is something he is failing to explain to his boss's satisfaction ...)
I think i better post this as an AC for obvious reasons :)
As soon as you remove 5 of the 100 from the model, you got another 4 employees that you have to rank with at 5, to meet the 5% quota.
When 'Dickie boy Brown' was CEO of EDS, during the continuing Black Days, He wrote a book that described the process of eliminating (or improving: see eliminating) the bottom 20% or the organization. They called this process thrashing. Only few of the employees ever read the book or understood that this is what it meant as it was all coached under phrasing like employee development.
Former disgruntled employee looking for a company worthy of my loyalty.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
You've got to have some system to identify which employees get what share of the loot. I'm not egalitarian enough to advocate the same raises and bonusses for top performers as for useless slugs. And I'm certainly not too thrilled with my own company's policy (all the loot goes to the CEO and the CEO's closest henchpeople).
When done right, a ranking system works just fine. And, in all but the smallest companies, it's pretty much unavoidable.
Notice that I refer to ranking in the context of pay and rewards, not layoffs. Once you use the ranking system to select layoff candidates, things go very badly awry.
Bad things companies do with ranking systems:
1. Firing all the people below some threshold.
2. Continuing to assume a gaussian curve, even after several rounds of layoffs.
3. Applying gaussian distribution to small populations, e.g. individual project teams, rather than large populations like the entire large corporation.
4. Applying the rank-and-fire methodology only to the rank-and-file. Too often the real problems are in upper management or exectutive levels, and those folks are invariably excluded from the system.
5. Letting prior year's ranking affect this year's ranking. i.e. judging whether to raise or lower a person's ranking vs. last year, rather than starting with a blank sheet of paper each year.
An inflexible "fire (at least) the bottom 5%" rule, as adopted by my employer, is just plain dumb. Apart from the obvious morale impact on the survivors, it just doesn't make sense. Do it once, you may get rid of dead wood. Do it twice, there's no dead wood left for the second round. After a while, you're firing really good people, just to meet a quota. (And using up prodigous amounts of toner, as your remaining good people print their resumes looking for a more rational company to employ them.)
The quota is completely fake, based on the mistaken assumption that when you lop off the tail of a gaussian curve, what's left behind is still a gaussian curve.
In my opinion, the root cause of this problem, as with so many corporate problems today, is executives and upper management that have only a short-term outlook. Short term, layoffs save money, and it really doesn't matter who gets the chop, or what effect it has on the morale, motivations, and behavior of the survivors. Long term, it may be disasterous, but corporate governence these days seems to care little about long term consequences of their activities.
My professor in multimedia (bullshit class I was overqualified for) told us that Hofstra University actually requires that some bad grades be given. Now this was a class of 8 people who with only one exception really did their shit in the class to get a good grade and get into the real stuff. She told us that if she gave us all A's as we deserved she would actually have to defend her grade practices to a commitee and since she was a part timer they would probably fuck her over if she did not document why the A's came out. She said that she pretty much had to give someone a C and whoever was unlucky enough to be in the B zone when everyone else was in the A zone was gonna get a C instead of B.
Let's say that your company want to assign a number to each person based upon the height: the tallest people get "5"'s and the shortest people get "1"'s. Now let's also say that we add the requiremnt that each department must have a bell curve distribution of ratings, regardless of the heights of the individuals.
If you have a deparment with a lot of tall people, some of those tall people would get lower ratings simply because you need to fill your quota. Likewise, a department of shorter people would have to give some of the short people "5"'s because of this quota.
Under this system, there is no way to gauge a person's height by their rating. A "5" is meaningless because it only means that the person is among the tallest in their department. If you compare this "5" with a "5" from another department, you have no way of knowing the relative heights of the people.
I have the same problem with curves in academia. An A should be an A, no matter when you take the test. However, if you take a class in a semester where there are a lot of idiots, your A only means that you were the best of the idiots. If you had taken the class with geniuses, you might have only gotten a B (or worse). I much preferred it when teachers weren't "afraid" to give everyone A's when they deserved it and everyone C's when they deserved it.
Some standardized tests grade on a curve, but they adjust the scores so that if the overall level of score is higher, then the mean score is set higher. Therefore you can compare scores from year to year.
If you want a rating system that has meaning, you need to have an OBJECTIVE way to set the scores. Otherwise, you cannot compare ratings in a valid manner.
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com