2y ago

Leaked Microsoft documents detail an employee performance review system where managers are quietly asked to adjust workers' results to limit the highest ratings

www.businessinsider.com

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floofloof @lemmy.ca

2y ago

Leaked Microsoft documents detail an employee performance review system where managers are quietly asked to adjust workers' results to limit the highest ratings

www.businessinsider.com /microsoft-new-employee-review-system-stack-ranking-2023-9

14 comments

Sounds like every corp.
- I can't even tell you how many time my annual reviews have been some form of "well you exceeded expectations and are one of the top performers on our team, that's why we are giving you a middle rating. Enjoy your COLA raise which is well below the rate of inflation."
  
  wonder how much money they lose long term by not rewarding good work and building lifetime employees
  
  The reviews are directly tied to the bonuses, so they have a point and Microsoft has financial motivation to doctor them. It's pretty frustrating that institutions with more money than they'll ever need, still engage in unethical practices to hoard more money. Like, you've made it guys, just be cool. Is it that hard to be cool?
- Standard at IBM 20 years ago
Performance management systems have always been rigged. Certainly at the last company that both my wife and I worked for. She had to manage a small staff, and come review time, she rated one deserving employee with a 4 out of 5 overall. HR called her in and said, "You can't give anyone a four, we don't do that here." They changed the scores and the employee got a 3 like everyone else. Complete bullshit.
- HR gets a 1 star
“We don’t give anyone 5 stars here.”
Irritatingly commonplace.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It was highly unpopular internally and the company officially abandoned it in late 2013, before long-time 'softie Satya Nadella took over in early 2014.
"What we tell the employees is absolute crap," one person involved with this year's review process told Insider.
"The tick marks are not meant to be ratings or labels — but instead a way for managers to determine impact and recommend rewards consistently across the company."
The manager who compared the process to stack ranking said that in practice, moving people to lower scores winds up being a necessity.
"If the employee delivered slightly lower impact than expected, their rewards will align below the middle of the opportunity range."
Microsoft Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan at the time instructed managers to give fewer employees "exceptional rewards," meaning a high performance rating that leads to higher pay and bonuses.
The original article contains 711 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is absolutely a thing they do at the tech company I work at too. There's hard limits on how many people can be rated anything 4 stars and up. Managers have to go to "calibration meetings" where they argue, in front of HR, with other managers about why their employee deserves one of the spots in the 4 (or more) stars club.
- Right, they use a bell curve. Which means someone has to get a poor rating, even if everyone was exceptional. It's BS and should be illegal.
  
  Agreed, all the employees hate it

14 comments