In Rebuttal to In Defense of Differentiation
Christopher Hawkins writes in In Defense of Differentiation that companies are already ranking their employees and that, since they are, the process should be open. I agree, up to a point.
It’s true that employers have opinions about how their employees are doing and that these opinions should be shared with the workforce. The ranking systems that many employers use, though, are just plain silly (or pain silly, as I originally typoed). Any ranking system that is public, where employees know who the “A” performers are and who the “C” performers are is bound to cause resentment — even a transparent system that lets me know why I’m a “C” doesn’t keep me from grousing about how Joe shouldn’t be an “A” — he’s not that much better than I am. Now Joe and I don’t work as well together.
Managers are more likely to judge by concrete results — lines of code or modules implemented — than by intangibles like mentoring, designing, and researching. If mentoring isn’t going to improve my grade, why should I bother to do it? I should just keep my head down and write code. In an enlightened office, learning and teaching are going to get the recognition they deserve, but an awful lot of places which like to assign people into categories aren’t all that enlightened.
It’s also the case that most of these ranking systems force managers to fit their employees into a curve — HR dictates that only a certain percentage can be graded “A.” There’s a fun review to give — “I really thought you should be an ‘A’ but I’m only allowed to give 2 and so I gave them to John and Fred. Sorry about that. But you’re still doing a great job.” Fun review to get, too.
Employees should have regular meetings with their managers where areas of concern can be discussed. Christopher says (rightly) that employees should know where they stand and should have clear performance benchmarks. That’s true, but that doesn’t require the ranking system that some companies use (and which was what got us all on this track in the first place).
(And we won’t even discuss whether managers have accurate pictures of the value that their employees bring to a team. Just know that when I read ” is there a manager alive who can’t tell you who his star performers are?” I started coming up with a list of names. (And no, they’re not at my current company.))
A former company implimented this ranking scheme, and the strangest part about our “reviews” were that we had to come up with our own goals, and our own list of items we’d like to improve on. It was nearly 100% hands-off for the manager. After we completed our self-evaluation, the manager simply said, “Thanks” and did with it what they felt.
We also knew of the “10% A’s” requirement, and we all agreed it was unfair. In our eyes, it showed us how little our managers knew us, and valued us. They needed a formula for labeling employees, rather than giving direction and purpose to their employees. Our raises were based upon this ranking, and you either were an A with a 5% raise, a B with a 2% raise (doesn’t even match the Consumer Price Index) or C with zero raise, a “Thanks for Playing” and an unspoken, “We are required to have X percent of our employees ranked as a C. Sorry about your luck.”
I think the idea is interesting, but in an environment which already has a slew of meaningless “metrics” for work output, this one took the cake.