July 20, 2012 at 8:40 am
I worked for a place using the stack rating system (i don't anymore) The ratings were tied to compensation. So management would decide that their salary budget could be increased by some percentage say n% All those rated a 3 would get an n% raise. Those rated a 1 or 2 would get less than n% and those rated a 4 or 5 would get more than n%. The total budget would have to balance exactly so there was lots of fudging. It was simply a system to control the budget and had nothing to do with truly rewarding people or helping others improve. It is the sort of system used by a company so focused on the financial results that they are willing to sacrifice good employees in the quest for for mediocracy. (it everyone's a 3 the budget balances and if you sprinkle the employees evenly aroung that middle number then you can create the illusion of fair and helpful reviews) This system is not the hallmark of a company I would want to work for.
Francis
July 20, 2012 at 8:42 am
I absolutely would not want to work in a company that uses a stack ranking system. Unfortunately, I do work for such a company.
I want my team members to spend their time and energy trying to come up with the best solution, not figuring out how they can look better than the next person. I always try to be a "5" by producing that level of work because I want the team, the product and the company to be successful. However, whenever the managers reject that reality because they have too many people operating at the "5" level, all they accomplish is proving to the high achievers that their achievements are worth nothing and that is why we have lost many of those people over the last year or so as the economy improved.
I may not be that far behind myself. I've stayed so far because I am very fond of my team members (the ones that are left that is...).
I often wonder who has their hand on the tiller around here and why there is no evidence that anyone is doing anything about the talent walking out the door. Absolutely pathetic. It seems to me that management should be shown the door.
As far as a better solution is concerned, self managing teams are the answer. The teams would be ranked on key performance metrics like meeting project deadlines, code complexity, number of bugs reported internally and externally and number of features delivered.
July 20, 2012 at 9:05 am
paul.goldstraw (7/20/2012)
- Employment demographics and targets. I'm pretty sure from the depth of my mind that some companies and public sector work places aim to employ a certain percentage of the workforce from minorities or based on gender, so they're letting a persons race, age or gender play a part in their decision making process. Given two applicants of approximately equal ability, they let their targets decide who should get the job.
Try an entire country. That's written into the labour law here.
To massively summarise, I can't get chosen for a job if another candidate is 'previously disadvantaged' and meets the bare minimum job requirement. By law.
Applies to any company over about 50-100 staff and any public sector position.
Of course, there are all sorts of loopholes and ways around it, but larger companies especially won't make the effort.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
July 20, 2012 at 9:36 am
If the stack ranks were understood to be a bell curve with a flexible median, it would work as a system. In other words, you may rate a person as a 1 because he's the worst in your team, but with the understanding that "worst in your team" can easily be "better than the best in every other team in existence".
Retain vs fire should be based on something else, like actual ability to get the job done, integrate into the team effectively, ethics, and so on. If the employee with a 1 just means "not as big a raise as the guys with higher ratings", or "less chance of promotion", instead of "get rid of the bum", then a bell-curve system like this would make sense.
But I seriously doubt any group anywhere would actually work that way. We're trained, socially, to assume that "1 out of a possible 5" as a score means "sucks".
The least brilliant scientists on the Manhatten Project were still geniuses, they just weren't as "geniusy" as some of their co-workers.
(The same concept would apply for a team that was all below median. A 5-score in a team of sub-morons wouldn't mean "great", would just mean "doesn't suck as much as the rest of us". But that's going to be useful even less often, since they should probably all just be fired. Unless they're a fictional version of the Cleveland Indians, of course.)
So, I can see some possible use for a system like this, but I think it violates basic principles of perception-management that are necessary for any system to be used successfully in most human environments. So, no, I don't see it as being useful in general practice.
And, as Paul mentioned, Microsoft's version of it is pretty well guaranteed to create a hostile environment that will innovate rarely. Innovation takes a willingness to fail, as per the famous quote from Edison about thousands of ways to not make a lightbulb. There won't be that willingness in an environment where a 1 means likely loss of job.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
July 20, 2012 at 9:40 am
Harsh ranking systems are very common in sales.
Someone told me about an automobile dealer he worked for where every month they started with 13 salesmen and at the end of each month, they let the three with the lowest sales go, and hired three new ones.
The result was that around the end of month they would fight over customers like sharks with chum in the water, and it was virtually impossible for someone to leave without buying a car.
They had valet parking and would take cars and drive them blocks away and never return them so that people were stuck there until they bought something. They would tell customers that the valet would be back with their car soon and just continue trying to make a sale until they broke down.
July 20, 2012 at 9:46 am
GSquared (7/20/2012) Microsoft's version of it is pretty well guaranteed to create a hostile environment that will innovate rarely.
I totally agree, this would be akin to posting everyones salary on the front bulletin board for all to see. It is guaranteed to cause massive friction and contention among your troops. 😀
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
July 20, 2012 at 9:47 am
Michael Valentine Jones (7/20/2012)
Harsh ranking systems are very common in sales.Someone told me about an automobile dealer he worked for where every month they started with 13 salesmen and at the end of each month, they let the three with the lowest sales go, and hired three new ones.
The result was that around the end of month they would fight over customers like sharks with chum in the water, and it was virtually impossible for someone to leave without buying a car.
They had valet parking and would take cars and drive them blocks away and never return them so that people were stuck there until they bought something. They would tell customers that the valet would be back with their car soon and just continue trying to make a sale until they broke down.
They're lucky if they're still in business. If they did something like that valet parking trick to me, I'd call the police and have people arrested for car theft.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
July 20, 2012 at 10:15 am
Steve asked "Would you like to work in a company that uses a stack ranking system?"
My Answer, "Only as long as it would take to find a better job where I would be appreciated as a person and a contributor."
Reason - I am not a machine that has no feelings, aspirations, or goals, and I would resent being treated as a cog, digit, or machine. I could not be loyal to a heartless collection of pontificating gods-in-training who judge as you state.
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
July 20, 2012 at 10:21 am
A manager's job is to take the time to know each of the people they supervise, understand the needs of the company, and make appropriate decisions on pay/ termination on a case by case basis. Otherwise, what are they getting paid for? Any type of magic formula system is just laziness.
The three biggest mistakes in life...thinking that power = freedom, sex = love, and data = information.
July 20, 2012 at 10:21 am
There are a lot of problems with this forced ranking. First of all, from a psychometric perspectiive, the ratings are only valid if they are reliable, and it is clearly the case that a single rating measurement of person from a single judge can be shown mathematically to have extremely low reliability (or in other words, the rating is mostly error variance).
Second, ratings are highly prone to various biases. Early in my career, I worked as a statistician for a national consulting company. We were hired by the U.S. Department of Labor to assess a company that used this type of ranking system. They took it to the extreme -- all employees were ranked within groups, then departments, then finally company wide -- resulting in all employees given a number, from 1 (most valuable) to 9,999 (or whatever) least valuable. When we dove into the numbers, we discovered exactly what you expect -- women, minorities, etc. ranked artificially lower due to overt bias. D.O.L ended up hitting them with a pretty hefty penality.
Third, anyone who reads the Organizational Psychology research (or who has experienced it first hand), knows that injecting unnecessary competitive elements into work groups brings out a lot of negative work behaviors. I believe that engendering trust and cooperation does a lot more for work group effectiveness, and it just makes for a more pleasant work environment.
In my opinion, employee evaluation systems to should be an individual thing -- employees are placed in a job that has certain KPIs and expectations. Employees should be measured against those, not each other. When an employee is not performing well against those, then interventions should be based on that -- either give them more training/tools, modify the job, or move the employee to a different job or out of the company. Measuring employees against their coworkers using vague and unreliable methods makes no sense, and ultimately is counterproductive.
My .02
Steve Parker
July 20, 2012 at 10:33 am
stephen 27828 (7/20/2012)In my opinion, employee evaluation systems to should be an individual thing -- employees are placed in a job that has certain KPIs and expectations. Employees should be measured against those, not each other.....Measuring employees against their coworkers using vague and unreliable methods makes no sense, and ultimately is counterproductive.
Stephen,
This reminds me of a performance review I once had several years ago where a manager actually brought up in my review the primary reason he was not giving me a raise that year. He said "You already make more that the other DBA's in your department, so we need to level the playing field a bit this year." I immediately replied back "Please don't penalize me because others in my department did not negotiate their salary well to begin with. That is their problem, it should not be made to be mine." Anyway, at the end of the review i promptly reported his statements to HR and he was reprimanded for saying that in a performance review, and ultimately let go. The company did give me a raise that year after all, and it was based on my performance review numbers. As it should be, not on someone else's circumstance or issues. 😀
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
July 20, 2012 at 10:34 am
I think this quote from Dr. W. Edwards Deming sums things up nicely:
What we need to do is learn to work in the system, by which I mean that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every component is there not for individual competitive profit or recognition, but for contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis
July 20, 2012 at 10:39 am
I worked for 10 years for a corporation that uses a similar system. It's a bad system, one that penalizes people that want to continue doing what they do best rather than competing for advancement, and a system with considerable potential for abuse. That potential might even be why they use it. I am glad to be free of it.
One byproduct of such a system is the phenomenon of predatory managers, clawing their way toward the top and making decisions that support their ascent rather than the people and units that they manage. They don't stay long, but they leave behind messes for others to clean up, and that can directly impact the performance of the business. It's a bit like students in school competing for the highest grades. But high "grades" don't necessarily measure ability to contribute, and may reflect personality disorders that can lead to serious corporate damage and loss.
July 20, 2012 at 12:27 pm
To borrow a line from House Guest (Sinbad et al), "uh, uh, no way, no how, see ya!"
Nutty system... And I hear MS automatically throws out the lowest numbered, irrespective of how skilled they are, they just happened to have to be lowest on the pole. A self-defeating system! If there was truly someone who merits a 1, then yes, they're a candidate for training or dispatch - train them first if they're considered trainable, or cut your losses if there's truly no hope for them.
Bean counters can be such idiots!
July 20, 2012 at 12:35 pm
SAinCA (7/20/2012)
To borrow a line from House Guest (Sinbad et al), "uh, uh, no way, no how, see ya!"Nutty system... And I hear MS automatically throws out the lowest numbered, irrespective of how skilled they are, they just happened to have to be lowest on the pole. A self-defeating system! If there was truly someone who merits a 1, then yes, they're a candidate for training or dispatch - train them first if they're considered trainable, or cut your losses if there's truly no hope for them.
Bean counters can be such idiots!
The role of people with personality disorders should not be overlooked in these systems. They are not all of the problem, but they just might contribute disproportionally to making life miserable for everyone else.
These are the folks that don't care who they do in or what damage they leave behind as they climb the ladder in pursuit of personal power, and as they rise they can also be the ones that implement "nutty" evaluation systems. Or has no one here ever seen such people in action?
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