Don’t get me started on forced ranking — lovingly referred to as “rank-and-yank” — the much maligned performance management system that forces managers to evaluate employees on a bell curve and then boot those at the bottom.
I don’t like it and never have. As I said last year, “it’s an arbitrary, formula-heavy performance system that’s obsessed with cutting people down instead of helping to build them up. Plus, it’s the brainchild of Jack Welch — and few executives today can execute it like Neutron Jack did.”
It’s on my radar this week because two big and notable companies — Microsoft and Yahoo — were in the news concerning their use of forced rankings.
Why Microsoft is ditching forced ranking …
At Microsoft, they got rid of it. According to The Wall Street Journal:
The Redmond, Wash., software company said it would no longer require managers to grade employees against one another and rank them on a scale of one to five. The system — often called “stack” or “forced” ranking — meant a small percentage of Microsoft’s 100,000 employees had to be designated as underperformers.
The rankings were a key factor in promotions and in allocating bonuses and equity awards under Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who in August said he plans to retire within a year. But many current and former Microsoft employees complained the system resulted in capricious rankings, power struggles among managers, and unhealthy competition among colleagues.
Microsoft said Tuesday it is dumping the numerical rankings in favor of more frequent and qualitative employee evaluations. The change took effect immediately.”
… while Yahoo is embracing the practice
This is good news in my book, but just as Microsoft is ditching forced rankings, Yahoo is going the other way by embracing a similar system. As Bloomberg Businessweek reports in a story that is headlined Yahoo’s Latest HR Disaster: Ranking Workers on a Curve —
If Marissa Mayer is as good at identifying winning startups as she is at embracing contentious human resources practices, Yahoo is going to be just fine. Several months after the great work-at-home kerfuffle of 2013, Yahoo employees were up in arms about a new policy that forces managers to rank employees on a bell curve, then fire those at the low end. According to AllThingsD, Marissa Mayer reportedly told Yahoo workers that the rankings weren’t mandatory, but many people disagree. The company hasn’t responded to a request for comment … (but) with its embrace of rankings, Yahoo has waded into the “third rail of human resource management.”
Why is forced ranking, “rank-and-yank,” or grading on a curve such a contentious and hated people management practice? Businessweek probably put it best:
The problem is workers generally aren’t thrilled about having to play Game of Thrones at the office. David Auerbach, a former Microsoft employee, recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that the practice had employees feeling helpless and “encouraged people to backstab their co-workers.” …
Basically, many people have lost faith that ranking employees works, and some research suggests that employee performance doesn’t follow a bell curve at all. Instead, most people are slightly worse than average, with a few superstars. And while a bit of pressure can motivate people, constantly pitting employees against one another is terrible for morale.”
Only 5% of high performing companies use such a system
One thing that surprised me in all of this was a number that jumped out of the Businessweek story. It said that, “companies performing well were less likely to be using forced ranking systems than those that weren’t, (and) just over 5 percent of high-performing companies used a forced ranking system in 2011, down from almost 20 percent two years earlier.”
That means that Microsoft is following the larger workplace trend ditching forced ranking, while Yahoo is going against the flow in putting such a system in place. Make of that what you will, but I think that the comment imbedded in the Businessweek headline — Yahoo’s Latest HR Disaster — probably says it all.
My friend (and former HR pro) Laurie Ruettimann has a different perspective, and she makes a compelling case for why forced ranking makes sense. It’s hard to have a discussion about the practice without revisiting her point of view that she expressed so memorably here at TLNT:
Steve Ballmer and Microsoft have their faults — but they also get a bum rap for a practice called stacked ranking. It’s like the Glengarry Glen Ross version of performance management. … But having worked with hundreds of companies, I know that all versions of performance management are variations of forced ranking and stacked ranking. This is why people hate HR. …
Step it up or get fired. That’s not an unreasonable request from your boss. Want to do it differently? Go start your own company. (Please. We need better companies out there. Do that.)
But don’t be fooled by people who talk about a crunchy-granola way of managing for peak performance. Stacked ranking and forced ranking may not outwardly happen at your company, but it happens.
The fact that you don’t know about it is why you are not in charge.”
More women getting jobs in technology
Of course, there’s more than forced ranking in the news this week. Here are some HR and workplace-related items you may have missed. This is TLNT’s weekly round-up of news, trends, and insights from the world of talent management. I do it so you don’t have to.
- More women getting hired in technology. Good news from the tech world, as reported in the San Jose Mercury News, “More than half — 60 percent — of the jobs created in the U.S. tech industry through September of this year have gone to women, according to one report based on numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. … The BLS definition of jobs in the tech industry include writing and testing software, planning and designing computer systems, managing and maintaining computer systems, and “other professional and technical computer-related advice and services.”
- 10 workplace trends that affect the way we do work. My friend Cindy Krischer Goodman, the workplace blogger and columnist at the Miami Herald, has gotten started early on her look at the workplace trends of the year. Her top 10 list is worth a good read, and the ones that jumped out at me were “Work-life boundaries erode and get reset,” and “Companies embrace employee retention.”
- The “untethered office” concept takes root. Getting workers out of personal office space is becoming more the norm these days, and as the Los Angeles Times notes, it’s even happening at the international real estate brokerage CBRE Group. “Corporations have experimented for years with office-sharing concepts such as “hoteling,” where workers such as accountants who travel frequently “check in” to a desk when they are in the office,” the newspaper reports. “After touring CBRE offices in Amsterdam, the company’s head of operations in Los Angeles and Orange counties, Lew Horne, decided to make what workplace consultants call a “free address” office in downtown L.A. That meant everyone, including senior workers and newly hired assistants, would have to give up their private turf.”
- Tackling a turnaround. Organizational turnarounds happen all the time, and as this HBR blog post notes, “The Boston Red Sox 2013 World Series championship will long be remembered as proof that you can turn around nearly anything.” Here’s some insight into how it is done.