In the corporate world, employees are constantly evaluated on their performance and often, bonuses and raises are tied to these metrics. At Microsoft, the company had been using ‘stack ranking’ which puts employees on a bell-curve and then compares them to their peers.
Employees and really, everyone below senior management have often disliked this practice, as it promotes playing the ‘corporate game’ as opposed to simply doing your job to the best of your ability. For those of you who work in the corporate world, you’ll understand that internal politics is often a bigger play into your career path, than simply showing up on time and working hard; stack ranking did not help this either.
In an email sent to all Microsoft employees, first obtained by Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is doing away with Stack Ranking, according to the email sent out by Lisa Brummel, who is the head of HR. This email was likely met with resounding joy inside the walls of Microsoft as the controversial ranking system is not always a fair assessment of an employee’s performance.
Microsoft will be doing away with the system that is highly utilized in the tech world with Yahoo!, Amazon and many others using a similar system to rank their employees. The system is designed to help weed out the low performing employees but because you must create a bell curve, it can happen that employees who are performing well, receive lower ratings, thanks to the way stack ranking works.
The email states that the reasoning for doing away with the system is part of the ‘One Microsoft’ and that they hope to promote even more team-work going forward.