As a business owner, who doesn’t have to worry about being stack ranked, I’ll say: continuous annual stack ranking to ensure a specific percentage of employees are put onto a pip or terminated is a terrible idea, and the people who institute it are bad at their jobs.
I’m not convinced that stack ranking is a good solution to this problem. A good organization and HR team knows how to terminate someone who is not performing well without incurring legal liability.
It can be a somewhat drawn out process, but a stack ranking system doesn’t seem like it would make it a lot faster to me.
My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is), and if you could continually prune the worst performing 3% of the org you could continually improve the quality of the remaining workers.
I’m fairly sure it really isn’t. Unless you hire random folks from the street it’s likely pareto or close. Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb because in the fat tail they’re all pretty close
Sure, I'd agree with that. I was just trying to say I can see where the "on paper" logic comes from. But the on paper falls apart in the real world, where we're not dealing with "resources", but people.
But, yea, I think even the "on paper" case is weaker than it naively appears.