Why ranking employees by performance backfires | Hacker News Reader

Why ranking employees by performance backfires

ft.com

29 pointshhs10 comments

Short summary: Fitting teams to a stack ranked performance quota system causes perverse incentives for management to hold on to poor performers, team members to sabotage each other, and high performers to avoid working on the same team.

Performance metrics are hard, gameable and impossible to get right. Ohh, and they can introduce some pretty bad side effects.

Stack-Ranking is the infamous one: Who wants to be the junior dev on a team of over-achievers?

It's also wasteful. Deloitte is one org that crunched the numbers on it. They scrapped their old system and moved to a new lightweight system. I'll have to check on their progress in the interim 6 years since this report.

https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management

Archive link: https://archive.is/ReWUU

Only if there is a conflict of interest in the people doing the ranking.

Paywall. So my guess is because managers really have no idea how to measure performance and have biases that will influence that ranking outside of performance implications anyways.

Someone let me know how close I got. :)

(some?) ft articles are readable if you are coming from a google search. At least it works for me when I search the article by title.

It's a shallow article on well worn territory. This is the closest it gets to touching your assertion

> A number of line managers told me they gamed the system. They would put people who had just joined the team in the bottom bracket, because they were easier to sacrifice. Or, perversely, they tried to hang on to poor performers so they could put them at the bottom and protect everyone else.

You are correct though, we have no way to accurately measure knowledge work. I'm a broken record on this, all performance management is subjectivity masquerading as objectivity.

It's making work about work that doesn't make the org more effective and in fact is toxic. There are too many examples from the past 40 years across industries for anyone to claim ignorance.

Here's a lynx --dump paste: https://pastebin.com/4n2DQ7Pc

tldr: First, it destroys intrinsic motivation. The requirement that the grading be done on a curve then produces losers where there are none. The employees game the system and this in turn destroys cooperation.

I worked at a company in the 90's that did stack ranking. But the team I was on was 10 people. Each with 10 different roles and skill sets. My boss was European and told his boss and HR to pound sand.

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