Microsoft and Yahoo Doomed By Forced Firing By Ranking
http://valleywag.gawker.com/yahoo-is-forcing-employees-to-rank-each-other-and-they-1462900871/@maxread
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-was-destroyed-by-its-stack-review-process-according-to-new-vanity-fair-expose-2012-7
Microsoft Just Killed The Controversial 'Stack Ranking' Review System That Killed Employee Morale
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-was-destroyed-by-its-stack-review-process-according-to-new-vanity-fair-expose-2012-7#ixzz2kSxfHZKR
She implemented the same system at Google, which was just ripped off from Microsoft. (which I think was ripped off from G.E.)
Microsoft chucks controversial staff-ranking system
CNET News · 1 hour agoMicrosoft kills Ballmer’s morale-wrecking employee ranking system
Yahoo! News · 55 minutes ago
See also: More stories · Top stories
Microsoft does away with stack ranking | ZDNet
Microsoft kills Ballmer’s morale-wrecking employee ranking ...
Why Microsoft Dumped "Stack-Ranking" - Digits - WSJ
Yahoo's Latest HR Disaster: Ranking Workers on a Curve
Businessweek · 2 minutes agoYahoo! Is Forcing Employees To Rank Each Other and They Hate It
Gawker · 5 hours ago
Nov 12, 2013 · 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.
If Marissa Mayer is as good at identifying winning startups as she is at embracing contentious human resources practices, Yahoo! (YHOO) 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... Yahoo has waded into the “third rail of human resource management.” Forcing managers to rank their employees along a bell curve was popularized in the 1980s (thanks, Jack Welch), but lately it has fallen out of favor.
Just over 5 percent of high-performing companies used a forced ranking system in 2011, down from almost 20 percent two years earlier. ..research suggests that employee performance doesn’t follow a bell curve at all. Instead, most people are slightly worse than average (PDF), with a few superstars
Yahoo! has recently implemented an archaic bell curve ranking system, compelling employees to artificially spread colleagues over a range of bad to good—even if reality doesn't actually reflect itself on a curve. That's the thing about bell curves: they look so great on paper, but not so much when you're looking around the room and thinking of who might get fired over it. Maybe it's you! And indeed, heads are rolling from the artificial curvature:
According to a multitude of top-ranking posts on an anonymous internal message board used by Yahoo to vent their frustrations to top staff, employees there are becoming increasingly upset by an evaluation system instituted by CEO Marissa Mayer that has apparently resulted in the firings of more than 600 people in recent weeks...the "Quarterly Performance Review" system forces managers to rank some of their staff with designations of "Occasionally Misses" and "Misses," even if it is not the case
Businessweek also points out that this kind of rationalized review is just bad for business. Of course, it's horrible for morale: AllThingsD says livid employees, who are basically being asked to betray their coworkers in the name of statistical neatness, are taking to an internal message board with their gripes:
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-was-destroyed-by-its-stack-review-process-according-to-new-vanity-fair-expose-2012-7
Microsoft Just Killed The Controversial 'Stack Ranking' Review System That Killed Employee Morale
Here's one big internal problem with Microsoft, according to Vanity Fair:
Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-was-destroyed-by-its-stack-review-process-according-to-new-vanity-fair-expose-2012-7#ixzz2kSxfHZKR
She implemented the same system at Google, which was just ripped off from Microsoft. (which I think was ripped off from G.E.)
