What Is Forced Ranking?

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  manvinder2403/27/07 Report as spam
  1

  Asians are not ready yet

  Asian managers used emotional judgement and are not factual even in forced rankings.This is my 13+ years experience.

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  Boxxy06/26/07 Report as spam
  2

  Force Ranking

  I do feel that it is required and it is happening in most of the companies in asian market. Be it manufacturing, general or software industry.
  
  In software industry, it is hard to understand that advantage is given to tech people specialized in particular domain. You can not roll out in software or any skill required industry

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  indiasfinest03/20/08 Report as spam
  3

  ok

  thats great, but dont speak on behalf of a race of millions of people, your 13 years of experience with those select asians has nothing to do with them on a global, or even national scale

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  manel.garcia@...03/27/07 Report as spam
  4

  How to loose singular brains

  It is part of the human behavior the trend to value as positive those people who agree with us. With this attitude, the result is to get rid of people with different opinions, ideas and behaviors, and promote the ones that say everything the boss wants to hear.
  The arguing people are considered ?negative? and their ideas are systematically ignored.
  Such attitude leads the organization to a homogeneous one, gray, with no new ideas and with a fundamental lack of creativity. The leitmotif is don?t express your opinions or ideas because if they go in a different direction as the official ones, you risk to be considered a underperformer or even worse. Do not undertake new projects, or take new decisions, because you risk to be wrong. No ideas, no errors.
  
  To those corporation leaders I would recommend reading an small and old book called ?The prince?, by Nicola Maquiavelo. You can take on the role of ?prince? and realize how munch can be learnt from a five centuries old writer.

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  ALENSK04/03/07 Report as spam
  5

  KPI

  As any other "ranking system", this forced system must also have sam official KPI system which must evaluate employees before grouping them into A, B, or C category. KPI system depends on specific business processes, so first You must define logical and improvement criteria KPIs to evaluate employees. After complete logical (profit) evaluation, discussion about grouping can begin.

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  bnetreader04/28/07 Report as spam
  6

  performance criteria and manager competence

  Performance criteria needs to be clear, fair, consistent and well understood by managers. If managers happen to be poor performers themselves, asking them to apply forced ranking will be disastrous to the team, project or company. I've had managers that did not monitor the work or people they managed and used forced ranking. Favoratism and bias were rampant in this company. Anyone who agreed with the manager the most in a visible way always got ranked the highest. Contribution was not used to make the evaluations! Forced ranking has no way to remove the poor performers if managers are not able to make the distiction between good performance and bad performance. Forced ranking is not something I would ever recommend if managers are do well trained or do not work closely with the people they evaluate. I know a very large and well known IT company that is in the process of learning this.

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  DeniseD11/22/07 Report as spam
  7

  RE: What Is Forced Ranking?

  My company does forced ranking and the ranking criteria is completely biased and subjective as their is no published rubrik or scorecard that one can use to quantitatively measure employees and compare against each other. I was at a roundtable recently and was absolutely disgusted. It's even worse to think those conversations are going on about me.

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  caenglish@...11/30/07 Report as spam
  8

  Is your supervisor an informed advocate?

  One point of issue with this system is the 'debate' that ensues between leaders as they defend their employees against others. Will the loudest leader get the higher ranking for his/her employees? You better hope your leader understands your work and the value you have created. It's critical that your supervisor be an informed advocate.

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  joeldi01/15/08 Report as spam
  9

  What if Everyone is a Star Performer?

  I have no ax to bear against forced ranking because I have fared well with it. However, being in the I/O psychology field, I find it disgusting. Steve Scullen's research on it is an excellent piece of work and highly recommended reading. What needs to be done is *absolute* ranking where employees are scaled on Behaviorially Anchored Rating Scales (BARS) where ratings are tied to descriptions. In order to make this work, however, managers must be held accountable, ensuring they are accurately and fairly rating their employees. It is more work, but definitely a better system.
  
  What if you had a company of 100 people, all star performers? Would you really rate the bottom x% "poor" performers? It just doesn't make sense to me. Joel

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  pramod_recw03/09/08 Report as spam
  10

  Solution - Benchmark

  What is everyone is a star performer in the organization? Great, I would love to be in that company. In such companies "absolute" forced ranking does sound good method of ranking and then there will be some bottom % who have exceeded the responsibilities but not as good as others. GMAT and other competitive examinations have a method "percentile" which will definitely tell us who are not performing upto the standards. Then the company should have a benchmark. Anyone if not meeting to the benchmark may be not performing to the level the company requires. It is just an utopia, I don't think there is any company wherein everyone is a star performer.

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  sellemmt01/15/08 Report as spam
  11

  RE: What Is Forced Ranking?

  The concept of Force-Ranking is legitimate from an HR perspective. However, implementing a successful force-ranking requires an organizational culture that absolutely perfect in its ability to measure and determine the categorization of its workforce. Non-confronting and buddy -buddy culture is the critical ingredients for making force-ranking a big failure

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  An Expat in France01/16/08 Report as spam
  12

  Forced Rankings = Hitting "Refresh"

  Simply put: Forced Rankings moderate the use pre-established objective criteria in employee performance evaluations, with a negative mid- to long-term effect on recruiting and retaining top performers, even if it is only a temporary policy.
  
  Pros:
  It gives companies the chance to hit the "refresh" button on their staff; underperformers will either leave, be fired, or be fired-up (if they don't have good prospects of finding comparable work outside the company). The company may even begin to attract confident top performers who view it as an attractive individual opportunity.
  
  Cons:
  The Company weakens the emotional/social contract that it has with each of it's employees - the unspoken agreement that "I'll do my best for you, and trust you to do your best for me" - upon which the Company/employee relationship is based. This relationship becomes increasingly transactional, even for those who receive the top ratings, and loyalty diminishes at all levels, leading to an exit risk among even top performers.
  
  And in the end, it is the employee who brings the relationship to the table - not the Company. How many times can a company hit this "refresh" button, before it becomes viewed as a grist mill for everyone except those who are deemed "top" performers by managers who appear to "play favorites?"
  
  Lack of competent new applicants will stifle a company's productivity pretty quickly.

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  AJTarantino01/16/08 Report as spam
  13

  Nothing Wrong with Classification

  I don't understand why people are upset about this type of classification. I work in the financial investment industry and we encourage our representatives to rank their clients from A to D. This way they are able to give more attention to the revenue (ie., most productive) producing clients and marginally handle their lowest producing clients. In turn, my company ranks these representatives from A to D in order that we spend more time with our most productive reps and less time with our most problematic or lowest revenue-producing reps.
  
  There is nothing wrong with classifing or creating a "forced" ranking of employees. We are too coddled in our society presently and need to break out of a "We are all winners" mentality. We are not all winners and never will be. We are humans and competitive. If those who are giving their time and energy to grow a company are getting rewarded much more than those who are doing nothing, what is the problem? I wouldn't want Joe Schom in my same department getting the same raise as me when he's done nothing for the year and I've stayed later and worked overtime to get my job done correctly and exceptionally.

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  garymary198801/16/08 Report as spam
  14

  I welcome it

  I am a consistent top performer at the Director level "hidden" in the ranks. This year, I decided to look for a VP or COO position outside the company and informed my VP of this intention. My company has not been recognizing, rewarding and promoting it's own top performers, yet the company is baffled by a leadership turnover rate of 25%. We need to do a better job at keeping our top performing talent and letting go of those who do not serve the mission and vision of the company.

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  ric.sellar@...01/16/08 Report as spam
  15

  Ranking and internal competition

  Those who favour forced ranking normally are not challenged by the results. What this system does, in my view, is create an internal competition mindset where information may be withheld or "forgotten" and may adversely affect someone else. We don't necessarily have to be the best; we just have to ensure someone else is below us. I have worked hard all my career, and put in long hours and weekends on countless occasions. I believe in a need for continuous improvement and comparing process and results to the business and personal plans. There are ways of dealing with non performing employee that enforces accountability without creating the undue stress that can be caused by forced ranking.

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  yogshastri01/16/08 Report as spam
  16

  RE: What Is Forced Ranking?

  This kind of system can be misused. It is in practice in my organization (Incidentally a PSU) and equitable distribution of perks and promotions had often forced the top management to give good grades to the bad performers and vice versa. This system cannot be effective until it is candid and transparent.

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  kcouch01/16/08 Report as spam
  17

  Change is all that matters

  Any style of management, or for that matter, talent management is only good for a limited time. People become aware of how the system works, and then adapt to optimize their outcome. This is evident in that there isn't any one absolute method guaranteed to yield maximum performance consistently which transcends industry or organizational structure.
  
  It is the role of whoever is managing workforce talent; to be keenly aware of when a system is not achieving an expected result, and replace it with one that will.

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  pramod_recw03/09/08 Report as spam
  18

  Forced Ranking - Biased

  Most of the companies are following forced ranking with different names. I know one company which practises Distributed Forced Ranking method where a certain number of people are ranked A,B,C, etc to satisfy a normal distribution. But the ranking has no partical base, sometimes the performance is compared with another person, sometimes the performance is comparted with the role description, sometime the ranking is given only due to experience and most of the time it is biased towards a couple of people who are dear to the manager not because they are exceptional performers, but just biased (I can't give the true reason). And all these comparisions does not happen before giving the rank, the rank is given by the manager based on (something...) and these comparisions are just explained to the direct report just as a justification. I suggest one should implement a metric based performance management system where in ever factor should be converted to a number.

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  sathyaramanav05/02/08 Report as spam
  19

  RE: What Is Forced Ranking?

  Force Ranking is Good ,
  
  1.when there are right measuring parameters
  2.Organization is ready to share the performance data of top 20 %
  
  -- Sathya Ramana Varri

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  WULAIMOT05/12/08 Report as spam
  20

  RE: What Is Forced Ranking?

  There is nothing wrong with creating of a Force Ranking of employees but the Manager should be well trained & work closely with the people they evaluate without bias, favourism etc...
  But I will suggest Absolute Ranking because some employees render Management support services wherein successes are attributed to the manager they work with. In such case, the company may loose good brains if they are not recognised in time.

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  J_Lag05/20/08 Report as spam
  21

  RE: What Is Forced Ranking?

  I think forced ranking is a good thing to make managers more stringent in their yearly evaluation process. I have seen it work really well but also not so well - managers have vastly different views on what a good performance looks like - and have seen someone ranked highly when they were under performing in the eyes of all but their manager (who is also a friend) and this meant someone more deserving gets pushed further down the curve and missed out on bonus/stock/benefits or even a promotion. Great training needs to be given + I think the end decision has to be the MD or HR managers.