Stack ranking vs bell curve7/29/2023 ![]() Yet, while its popularity has significantly waned, stack-ranking is still very much practiced.Įxhibit A: Even as Microsoft announced retirement of its stack-ranking system, Yahoo! let it be known that it was moving to a stack-ranking system of its own. But in recent years, it has become almost universally loathed for its supposedly debilitating effects on morale. corporations seeking to identify employees for layoffs. Stack-ranking became popular in the 1980s, especially with U.S. To generate the required bell curve, only about 10% of employees could get a 5 another 10% had to get a 1 the other 80% had to fall in the middle ranges of 2 to 4. The practice essentially pits one employee against another.Įxample: At Microsoft, each employee was assigned a performance grade between 1 and 5. Stack-ranking, aka forced ranking, requires managers to rank all employees on a bell curve. Here’s what HR managers need to know if their organizations use or are even considering the use of stack-ranking. While the management and morale implications of stack-ranking have gotten tons of press, much less attention has been paid to the practice’s legal ramifications. I mean yes, you gotta do shit, but there are layers to this.Although Microsoft recently ditched it, many other employers still use stack-ranking to evaluate employees and winnow out poor performers. Just shit for mental health of the workers to base everything on performance and competition. Those evalutions described in this thread sounds toxic and stressful. Last time I felt that socially comfortable with a 'boss' was in my high school years in the moving business and that dude made us all smoke hash before packing up houses lol. She's very human, down to earth and just easy to talk with about anything. To be fair I consider I have a very good relationship with my manager and I hope she sticks along for a while. Other than that, it's based on feedbacks from other employees and if I just.basically get the job done well. They always are doable and even if I don't meet one, we just laugh it off and push it back as a continuing objective the year after because there's always a good reason behind it. I do have yearly evaluations but it's mostly based upon three 'objectives' each years, if there is progress or if it's done. Fwiw, I generally work for a very good company and I’m happy here, but it’s a policy I don’t like… Though oddly didn’t even know it *was* the policy until I moved into management. But I suspect it’s temporary and next year or the year after it’ll be back tot he norm. THe pandemic and tech boom started to change this and because retention was harder from 2020-2023, we softened the policy a bit… encouraged more higher rated people as a carrot to incentize them to stay. We don’t have a perverse incentives program like a lot of JAck Welch influenced companies do (e.g it’s better to be a high performing level 2 than a low performing level 3). Your rating is relative to your job level/code, and so if you’re promoted you get your rating reset, which then opens up someone in that lower level (or your level) to move up in rating. This is super, super common in large tech companies, especially old school ones. There are many, many, many 4’s, everybody sorta sits at 4, but if you go up, it’s basically because someone else dropped from a 5.0 to a 4.5. ALmost everybody is 3.5-5.5, and the managers basically have to negotiate moving someone from a 5 to a 5.5, and then that means someone else in their wider group has to be moved from a 4.5 to a 4, or vice versa. Nobody is a 6, except for incredibly rare impossible cases. Anybody who is a 3 who is not a new hire is getting pipped. The scale is really only between 3-5.5 too. I didn’t know our performance review rating system worked the way it did until I became a team lead. Now this doesn’t mean all employers do, but when a ton of the highly rated, high retention companies have this policy, it’s more common than you think for smaller or less prolific companies. Not as strict as 90s Microsoft, but it’s still the same policy. I work for a top 10 glass door company, and at least 5 of the other companies in the top 10 stack rank similarly. I wonder how many people think their work doesn’t do this, but they actually do. We basically have a stack ranking system similar to 2000s Microsoft, so yes, we do.
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