
Inviting input from a broader group helps build a more complete mosaic of a person’s work performance and impact, smoothing out any biases that may be introduced when a review relies on just one person’s opinion (a person’s direct manager). A finance manager may work with department heads across the organization. An engineer might work regularly with a product marketer or a salesperson. Instead of interfacing only with the same small group every day, we are cross-pollinating and collaborating with people from all over the organization. Why is this effective? Because most of us now work in networked ways, not hierarchical ways.

#Employee stack ranking how to#
Manager-driven stack rankings result in people “managing up,” which rarely leads to keeping the best people - instead, you keep people who best know how to work the system.Īs an alternative, I recommend a performance review based on Organizational Network Analysis (ONA), which considers the views of an employee’s in-company network, across departments - reflecting the networked way most people work nowadays. I’ve spent the past two years helping companies improve the way they do performance reviews, and I can tell you that Musk’s approach is exactly the wrong tack to take. This exact scenario is playing out at thousands of companies across the US as they consider staff reductions and make difficult decisions about whom to let go.

Musk would then have built on those plans by first targeting low performers - people the company’s human resources system designated as ‘not on track’ or receiving below a 3 out of 5 rating - before moving to other phases of downsizing.”Įven worse, more recently Platformer reported that layoff decisions were also made based on two-sentence descriptions managers were asked to write on each direct report. The move has been protested by staff members, but Twitter says other tech companies have the same practices. “ is instituting a performance review system called stack ranking that requires managers to grade employees on a numerical curve, so that a set percentage of workers will always be marked as low performers, according to one of the company documents obtained by The Post.

The paper revealed that Musk planned to use manager-driven stack rankings to decide which staff will go. However, if the aim is to have your employees work together and help one another, then another method for measuring performance is preferable.In October, the Washington Post reported details on Elon Musk’s plans for massive layoffs at Twitter. A cutthroat environment: If you want to create an environment of competition inside the workplace, then ranking should work just fine.If they have other duties, such as keeping customers happy or supervising junior staff members, then it is grossly unfair to rank the employee on only one, narrow aspect of his job.

