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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."
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!
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.
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).
But in my opinion this is a terrible system. The bell curve has no true logical basis. And even if it did, this system would still be flawed: assume a company of 1000 people split into 10 divisions of 100 people each. Under this system each of those 10 divisions must utilize this ranking system. But what if one division has all 100 of the "superstar" employees, and another has all the worst employees? Under this system, a certain percentage of really bad employees must be ranked as above average or "superstars" while a certain percentage of true "superstars" must be ranked at below average or failing.
I think any person who would implement such a system is a true "1" It is just an obviously bad system. They should simply allow each division head to rank at will, then essentially "meta-moderate" that persons rankings somehow. Have someone come in an audit the department from either the outside or from another department to see how accurate those rankings are... That would be a much better system...
--Kobayashi--
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."
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.
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...
This is the best advice. If the company you are at identifies people who are working below average, this is good. If the employees sees this designation as an opportunity to improve this is good. If the employees feel threatened by this system, or see it as a source of internal competition, then management has failed. If management does not understand this failure, then you should just get out.
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.
What about a forced rank scale implies that the ranking is objective? All it seems like it does is fix the problem of rank inflation. It doesn't do anything to fix the underlying problem that it is praticially impossibly in most situations to objectively measure someones performance. At my company the rankings are supposed to be based on meeting objectives laid out in the previous review period. I don't think my job as ever stayed the same between review periods effectively making the ability to measure progress toward any specific objectives dubious.
I never really like performance reviews to begin with and I dislike them even more with the ranking system. Till now I actually never considered that it might foster a bad sort of competition among team members. Seems like the tech industry already has enough problems with workers hoarding knowledge and poor communication and the ranking system has the potential to make this worse.
Ranking is a new HR trick to fire people the old fashioned way. Lets fix the underlying problem and really do the hard work of establishing metrics to measure performance, was the project on time? Did it meet the requirements? Is the maintenance cost low?
Till then we'll continue to watch the incompetent but personable rise in the ranks.
This actually works for the first few rounds. The problem is, let's say you have 100 employees. You probably have 10% of them that you could fire and be better off. So the first year you do that. You hire 10 more people to replace them. Now you've got
+1 fireable person and +9 better than that. repeat.
Pretty soon, you get to the point where you've burned off the dead wood and are now burning your future forest. Otherwise, you are saying that people's performance automatically degrades and/or the HR department can't hire for sh*t (both of which may be true).
Anyway, I realize the parent might be joking, but seriously, these forced ranking things are only going to get more popular if for no other reason than lawsuit avoidance. You can't sue for a bad review if the hiring manager must give a certain percentage of "bad" reviews.
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.
You think most CEO's 1. Are smart enough to realize what a valuable resource is Slashdot can be? 2. Humble enough to ask the opinion of ANYBODY else? I've not seen it.
The only addendums I'd make are:
4. Projects - Don't over-extend yourself, though. When you step up, you need to be able to execute.
8. Do Things by the Book - Know what the whole "book" says, not just the parts written down. And know when/how to break/change the rules when they are broken. Each organization has a mechanism for change, written or unwritten. If you're stuck in an organization that does not, get out -- down that path lies madness.
That would be any human trait, when selected for on a random basis. Companies do not do random selection of humans. That turns the bell curve into a description of trait distribution into a tool for abuse and workplace tyranny.
And all the teachers that I ever had would rely on a bell curve, but not completely. If every person in the class got above 90% on a curved test, they would not have flunked the bottom portion. That would be grossly unfair.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
The real problem with the rating system in question is twofold.
First, it assumes that employee quality is a perfect bell curve. That would be true only if positions are filled by a fully random process, but by assigning quotas, they demonstrate that they are more than willing to torture the data to fit their expectations.
The second is that having assigned reletive ratings to the employees, they are then conflated into absolute value judgements.
By enforcing the percentages, they have turned the ratings into a zero sum game (if you improve your rating, someone elses must go down). That is intrinsically opposed to teamwork which operates on the basis that the whole may be greater than the sum of it's parts.