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Ask Slashdot: How Does Your Company Evaluate Your Performance?
jmcbain writes "I'm a former Microsoftie, and one thing I really despised about the company is the 'stack ranking' employee evaluation system that was succinctly captured in a recent Vanity Fair article on the company. Stack ranking is basically applying a forced curve distribution on all employees at the same level, so management must place some percentage of employees into categories of overperforming, performing on average, and underperforming. Even if it's an all-star team doing great work, some folks will be marked as underperforming. Frankly, this really sucked. I know this practice gained popularity with GE in the 1980s and is being used by some (many?) Fortune 500 companies. Does your company do this? What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
I work in healthcare and the model often used is Brenners Novice to Expert. This looks at the development of an individual in their practice. While a great model since it allows one to compare themselves to themselves and looking for improvement, it also promotes team work. Of course this is a little difficult to apply many software firms. Another model is using a 1-5 scale, where 5 is exceptional, 1 is unsatistifactory, 3 meets criteria, 4 is exceeds criteria, and then they tally these for whatever metrics used and divide to get an average. Comparing staff to each other does not develop team work and only works in competitive environments like sales where you want people to outdo each other.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Agreed. The only way to win is not to play.
I've just finished a job with what used to be a great company and more importantly with a great team with common sense (immediate) management (so no bullshit metrics). The whole atmosphere in the team was to share all knowledge, 100% cooperation, no competition. Holes in knowledge were filled very quickly, everyone loved work, and everyone ended up an over-performer. (So kudos to the recruiters for getting the right kinds of people who thrive in that kind of environment in on the project.)
I suspect I'll not find a company like that again, which is a real shame. (Having said that, the seeds of a start-up are forming...)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I think we're still a Fortune 10 company... we manufacture consumer products globally, and have a global performance evaluation (PE) process. I will be as generic as possible in the terminology. Oh, I'm a manager who conducts PE's, and also a volunteer on the personnel development forum (PDF) for non-management personnel.
For PE's, we have a top-tier level that's limited to 15% of the eligible pool. In my department so far this year, we've not nominated enough people to meet that 15% (we're in a new region, and all of the local employees are new). Then there's 70% to 85% of people that are achievers. This bracket is slightly open because there's an allowance of 15% of under-achievers and non-performers. The key is, we're *not* forced to bracket anyone into the lower tiers. And like I said for the top tier, we're not forced to bracket people into that tier, either.
Our system makes sense. Not everyone can be a super-star; even when everyone is a super-star, there's always a small percentage that have a little bit of an edge. And because we're not forced to rank anyone as under-achievers, we recognize that even the weakest link might be carrying his or her weight -- and carrying weight (do your job) is all we ask!
To prevent abuse, all of the top 15% and the lower 15% (if any) all go to the PDF committee that I mentioned I'm in. There, my fellow managers and I review the proposals for the highest-achiever rankings, and we all have to agree. Basically, you can't screw your way to the top, or other methods of brown-nosing.
And as a low-level manager (organizationally-speaking), I'm subject to the same process at my pay grade. And I'm fairly happy with it.
--Jim (me)
On my team, we use a sort of 360 degree review process. The people I manage meet with me and my boss on a quarterly basis, and we use the time basically to check in on any issues we've identified, check on any goals set in the last quarterly review, talk about training / certification progress, listen to any concerns they bring up with people / processes / environment, etc. At the end of the review, I leave the room and the employee gets to talk to my boss about me, without me in the room. Then I come back in, my boss leaves, and we talk about my boss without him in the room. My boss and I aggregate and anonymize the top 2-3 things that people mention about us, and that becomes a part of our reviews.
My reply had been to the GP, about union problems.
Anyway, if they insist on stack ranking, then hire (or transfer) someone in to be the bottom of the pile. Game theory is the only way to play silly games.
A previous boss of mine (in IT, an American employer) did something like this. Played internal politics and "transferred" someone from another group in the company (we shared our building with multiple groups from the same multinational). It was understood that the company would play silly games like this, and the person in question kept working for group B, but technically belonged to our cost centre, and was there as ballast to be made redundant when the 10% chop came around. He knew it, and was already working on his plan B (planning his own company, I believe, which would be ready the moment he got his redundancy money).
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
This doesn't work though.
I can give you a real world example. My partner was a retail manager for a well known denim retailer, and was consistently the top in the country each year in terms of year on year growth no matter which store she was assigned to. The problem is only one manager was allowed to be graded 1 on a scale of 1 to 5 or whatever it was. She obviously deserved it as she was the one consistently performing the best, but this had issues.
If it was given to her year on year, the other managers felt they had no chance and just had no motivation to excel themselves because they were only going to get a 2 anyway - they could try really hard and almost do as well as her, but not quite, so why try when they'd get a 2 regardless? The worst part being these grades were linked to your annual rise, so no matter how hard you tried you'd only get a smaller rise against her.
So the management figured well hey, we need to motivate the other folks, so we'll give it to them for how hard they tried, rather than actual results, and so then it's my girlfriend who despite her stellar performance instead suffers and gets a lower payrise. Then she has no motivation to really continue to outshine, because she's not gaining anything for it, in fact, someone that performed worse than her is getting a better reward than she did.
Of course, the solution may then be to increase the number of people who get a 1, but then at that 1/2 boundary you have the EXACT same problem. Those who try real hard can never quite catch the top performers so are not motivated to do so. Really, the only solution is to instead rank people based on a sensible balance of effort and performance without any cap on how many can be deemed to be top performers. If you extend it to say 5 out of 30 people can have the top grade, then what happens when your survival of the fittest type management system gets the 6 best managers in the country in? well, the 6th one will fuck off elsewhere because they'll be getting shit on relative to the others. It'd be far better if all 6, or all 7, 8, 9, or 10 could get equal reward so that you retain the 10 best managers in the country, rather than stick yourself permanently with only the 5 best, letting the other 5 fuck off to your competitors.
The problem with your theory is that yeah, it works great for the top person, but what the fuck is the use in a system that means that 29 of your 30 staff just have no reason to be motivated? That's a complete failure of management.
I've personally not had a problem being in the top percentile myself, but I'd absolutely fucking hate to work under this system because it'd mean everyone around me was unmotivated meaning I'd be carrying the team - I want my coworkers to be motivated, I want them to do well, to be praised, to be given reason to care about their job, because that makes my life easier regardless of whether I'm a top performer, or a bottom performer.
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
If you hire good managers you don't need this kind of crutch, the good managers will know who deserves what praise and reward, and who needs to be fired.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Unions are great IF they don't have laws written to give them special rights.
Unlike corporations, then.
Unions exist with special legal status precisely because corporations exist with special legal status.
A corporation is not a "a group of people freely associating to promote their self-interests": it is an inherently coercive organization protected by the full legal muscle of the various Companies Acts around the world. When a person employed by a corporation interacts with someone outside the corporation they are protected by a shield of laws that completely over-rides the ordinary operations of free behaviour.
So, if you really want unions to not have special legal protections, you need to eliminate the special legal protections given to corporations, which means you need to eliminate corporations as such, and go back to the situation before 1850 or so when the first modern Companies Act was passed in Britain. That system was unwieldy and inefficient, as no single entity with quasi-individual legal status (the corporation) could do anything like sign contracts, etc.
Yet for some reason I have never heard anyone who makes the kind of arguments you do against unions point any of this out. Why is that?
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