Posted on 12/04/2014 7:24:10 PM PST by killermosquito
My supervisor said that performance evaluations will begin soon. She wrote, "The expectation is that the company follow the ‘bell curve’ in terms of percentages of employees that rank 0 – 4. In other words, I should not have employees that all rank 3 or 4, rather they should be spread as not all employees work at the same level.
I don't think this is the right way to look at this. Grading staff isn't the same as grading a classroom full of students. We each have different rolls and expectations. Our performance should be based upon how closely we each meet expectations.
my company has done it this way for years and it sucks. if you are on a team of rock stars, somebody has to get the shaft every year even though you are all performing at a very high level.
Performance evaluations were created to eliminate any raises you might think you deserve.
Just settle for some cheap prizes or trinket in lieu of raises. Maybe some unobtainable commissions or incentives.
Just shut up, and work harder for less and you’ll be A-OK.
I’ve even been told in past jobs that no one is to receive the highest marks on any category. Their excuse is “it motivates people to do better”. We all know it is to keep the merit increases to a minimum. I’ve argued this point countless times in the past as I watched my best employees leave at the first better opportunity. You can’t expect loyal employees if you don’t return the favor.
Welcome to the NWO, where they only hire the top 10% then endeavor to fire them at the rate of 10%. Rank and yank. Enron pionneered this.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth
i understood it.
your evaluations are personal, not group comparison rankings. it’s not a classroom. evaluations are how well you hit personal goals for the year, how you grew/got better on any issues you had to work on.
this is utter pc bullsh1t.
this is what companies’do to get rid of people they have no real cause to get rid of, but don’t have the balls to just come out and do it. generally white men who are highly productive but not into the company’s pc diversity bullcrap.
This is a fundamental element of performance appraisal systems. It is based on the statistical model of a bell-shaped distribution. First do your evaluations and plot the results of each employee to see if they fit this model and if not, make whatever adjustments (within reason) to see if you can adapt your evaluation decisions to meet the expectations of this model.
All that crap was concocted around conference room tables to keep the riff raff quit about wanting raises etc. In fact, that’s all the fatcorps do anymore is scheme to screw those down the food chain. Bigger bottom line, more in their pockets.
I hope I’m not being too blunt for the truth sensitive in the audience.
The final score is the average of all metrics. Some metrics may be weighted more heavily than others, depending on the needs and requirements of the particular job.
There should be no "wiggle room" in the evaluation -- the intent is to accurately measure how the employee is performing, and identify what areas need improvement. If an employee falls below a specific red line, it's grounds for probation; fail probation and s/he's fired for cause.
The problem is finding competent HR people, willing to work with the managers to set REASONABLE expectations and goals. Some companies like to "go with the gut" -- usually with disastrous results. IF you are in one of those companies, may God have mercy on your soul.
My prior job as General Manager of a small firm included being told ‘we need to institute performance reviews’ and I was to come up with something.
I was resolute in my belief that instituting performance reviews without a system of bonuses would destroy morale and harm services. Worse, management (the owners) were suffering from some serious internal conflicts resulting in issues the whole company both knew about and the core causes. Had I instituted performance reviews, it would have improved nothing.
I no longer work for that company. Just before my leaving they instituted a system of ‘procedures’ for ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING in a bid to ‘fix the problems’.
Nothing has changed. Had my role had any teeth, simple management would have resolved the whole issue. The principle problem with performance reviews being the issue of providing employees something measurable to work toward with consequent (and consistent) reward.
‘Grading staff’ with a 1-4 is a a simpleton’s approach to justifying a job or fulfilling another simpleton’s perceived control of their employees.
Alas, a warning to be finding another job before you’re laid off (as I was)...
“Ummmm, could I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure! What’s on your mind?”
“Well, you rated me as a zero. What does that mean?”
“No, that’s not a zero. That’s an O for Outstanding.”
It’s the Jack Welch school of mismanagement. Push 10% of your staff out each year using this method.
To place productive employees at the bottom of a bell curve - because somebody needs to be at the bottom - is wrong. An analogy to this is a baseball team that has every player batting .400 or above. You will not want to penalize a player for batting .404 because other players are batting .445.
However, this rarely happens. Most companies have deadweight and low performers that fall below the standards.
IMHO Enron did not pioneer this abortion of a management system. The USAF did.
In the mid-1970’s the AF had an imbalance of officers caused by the Vietnam build up. To help rebalance the officer corps they came up with a controlled OER system - 24% of officers in any particular grade could receive the top rating a ‘1” in their final box. 26% could receive a “2” and the remaining 50% (half your captains (for an example) could get a “promotable ‘3”. In at era promotion rates to major and LtCol were never more than 60% of those eligible you see the reason for the quotes around promotable.
The immediate impact was not the reduction in the number of officers serving but in the destruction of officer corps itself - why help a fellow officer if he got a promotable grade on his annual performance rating at your expense. Why mentor or train the new guy when he could beat you of a promotable grade next near? It also marked the beginning of the blind pursuit of “tie-brakers” that frequently had nothing to do with your primary job.
Developing and maintaining an effective management team is NOT something you learn behind a desk or in a text book. But, we continue to follow failures and wonder why it happens again, and again, and to abnauseaum.
Thank Jack Welch.
Everyone should be held to an attainable standard. How they compare to everyone else is irrelevant. How they compare to the stated goals and standards for their specific job should e all that matters.
If everyone is rated on how they compare, on averages, it pits people against each other and is an enemy of teamwork. I think the trend has moved away from teamwork and toward competition. Competition has its place between companies. But within a company I think it is more harmful than helpful. Some may thrive in that environment but many valuable people will not.
It’s simple - this is how big companies (at least) reduce salary cost increases while not violating EEOC law. If you legitimately have a group of high-performers, you should reward them with substantial merit increases that reflect their ability. However that would result in an increase in salary cost for your group, and thus for the company unless there was an equal number of under-performers who’d be getting salary cuts. And since that opens the company up for EEO complaints (on the likelihood that some of those losers might be members of a “protected class”), the simplest alternative is to “grade on the curve” and force first-line managers to solve the problem. Plus, what company is ever going to admit it’s got a bunch of overpaid underperformers drawing a paycheck?
So, you get crap like this, 9-blockers, etc - all kinds of HR-Bulls#it rationalizations for doing stupid stuff.
Exactly right, as a GE Manager once told me “There’s always a Bottom 10%”.
Would seem to depend on where one set the baseline - if it included the range of possible employees in the entire population, the curve wold probably be truncated on the left, or poorer employee side, since poor employees probably wouldn’t stay around the company very long - if the range included all employees who actually worked at the company, then it would seem reasonable to assume that there were some really good ones and some really poor ones, with a more or less “normal” distribution in between - how to evaluate each employee along the continuum accurately is another story....
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