Oh they taught this in basic classes in 4 year uni (not gonna state which uni as I don’t wish to dox myself), but I do agree ABK obviously wants someone who lined up with their toxic practice of stack ranking. It really isn’t bis for any company though.
A lot of people think it just means “grading on a scale” in a sense, and it is far from that. It is a “forced” scale.
Person 1: 99%
Person 2: 96%
Person 3: 96% (Change their score to 90%)
Person 4: 96% (Change their score to 74%)
Person 5: 95% (Change their score to 49%)
While Persons 3-5 made VERY good scores, they are being forced to take lower scores to complete the bell graph.
Because of this, now Persons 3-5 will also get less profit sharing as a “bonus” therefore making less money than that of Person 2 even though they had relatively the same scores.
Now that Persons 4-5 have shown issues in their work (by fabricated scores), they will now receive disciplinary action from their superiors and bad marks on their records.
Because of this they will now be out of the running for any promotions that Person 2 may be up for even though they performed at the same level.
This now affects them in their future careers with other companies as well.
This is all due the stack ranking FORCING bell curves in workforce performance whether their is one or not. Employees pay, advancement opportunities, and future prospects all come into risk because they are forced to take a lower score than they actual earned to fit the stack ranking model.
Nobody is arguing that if they performed less than par they should be ranked lower, but the fact is that people who perform well and above their duties are being forced to take an underperforming score.
When companies use this system VERY unethically (I don’t know how Blizzard us this) they will give these arbitrarily lower scored to minorities and women in the workplace.
In THIS scenario, the company will hire at the beginning of a year to fill diversity quotas to get bigger tax cuts and/or stipends (depending on the state); then when the evaluation come in, they simply give all those minorities and women lower scores for a reason to fire them. This allows companies to take money from the government and/or governmental departments for diversity and then fire them immediately (essentially legal fraud).
The list can actually go on with amount of shady crap you can do with this system as it is essentially lying to your workforce.
One last thing that happens a lot (which if you do some google research happened at Microsoft years ago) is it dropping a companies overall performance and ambition.
Many higher performing employees will simply join a very underperforming team and simply “coast by” since they know they will ALWAYS get the top performance evaluation on the said team. This is where the toxicity and laziness comes into play actually HURTING the company itself.
There is a lot more you can really go into with this system, but this is already a VERY long post as is. I don’t mean this as being aggressive either, it is just something I have always abhorred about the corporate world, and seeing my childhood gaming company employ this is just depressing to me.
