To ask for your experiences with ‘forced distribution’ in performance management?

[Spookytoast]

My workplace are now using this system for performance management where employees are ‘ranked and stacked’ against one another and a certain % have to be ranked at the bottom at the end of the year regardless of whether people have actually underperform or not. This obviously means no bonus or pay rise.

I don’t agree with it. As the year as gone on my colleagues have started to become secretive with projects, people are constantly determined to ‘improve’ processes that don’t need improving and teamwork doesn’t seem to work for anyone anymore because people need to be able to take all the credit for the work.

Has anyone got any positive stories of this kind of system in their workplace or tips on how not to let it affect working relationships? I think my colleagues are fab and hard working and couldn’t put anyone in the ‘needs improvement’ box but also don’t want to be put there myself!

It's awful. My company has done away with it now as it was so hated and I thought most other companies were moving away from it because of the issues others have described.

I think it can work over a whole company, buy my company applied it down to team level so in a small team of highly qualified professionals it meant someone was always ranked as inadequate even if they didn't deserve to be and had performed well in reality.

It led to a bit of a culture of ratting on people if they'd made a mistake.

This is actually mentioned in a book I read (think it was The Power of Habit) and was an awful idea for all the reasons you mentioned - it kills team work and creativity, disproportionately affects people with health issues/ caring responsibilities, causes unnecessary stress and creates hostile workplaces.

I would ask if it's a listening organisation but tbh if they were they probably wouldn't have parachuted this in on you.

I always think this reeks of poor management- after all good managers deal with poor performance and either sort out or take someone down the dismissal route...

To have it says the lower management isn't empowered to manage their teams effectively which is only a reflection on those at the top!

My dad was asked just before retirement if he minded having a shit performance review and rating as someone needed to be bottom. He thought it hilarious.
I imagine many older staff who are not concerned about losing their jobs are volunteering to be last, which might make these schemes look somewhat ageist.

Everywhere I have ever worked follows this forced ranking system. It is awful.

It’s awful and common across the public sector in particular central government

Where I worked used to have this and it was awful, it was so demoralising for people who worked hard all year (and been given a prospective rating throughout the year) to suddenly find out that they had in fact been underperforming. We had to argue for our reviewers in a calibration meeting where everyone was sorted. It was often those with the more aggressive reviewers or managers who got a good grade, and those with a less confident reviewer were stuffed.

Part timers were at a disadvantage because whatever they did they weren’t seen as putting in as much effort as full timers and therefore always lost out for promotion etc. Glad I’m not there anymore.

It’s also ineffective and unfair in the opposite direction. Say as a manager you took over a existing department and found it was riddled with poor performance and an unhealthy culture- how would you have a hope of dealing with that if you had to say that some people were good or excellent even if that wasn’t the case?

I think it’s justifiable as a way of distributing exam grades- it allows you to even out across several years where otherwise it can be difficult to account for individual papers being more or less difficult in comparison to others.

We had this in a national telecoms company i worked for. It was a disaster in terms of motivation and productivity. Only advantage for company is that it creates a feeling of instability/ insecurity, so useful at times when they were trying to reduce staff numbers.
There was one team who were among the top specialists in the world on particular technology being used to build out the network. Their design and influence were being used to provide a service that is now widely used (think about designing the network to allow video on demand/i-player etc ... but they were working on this 12+ years ago. The manager fought his corner to say they should not fall into a bell curve, but was threatened with being put on poor performance procedures himself. So the manager decided to put a different person in "needs improvement" each quarter. But within 6 months, the whole team had left the company and set up their own consultancy. Because they were the only people in the world capable of doing this work on the scale required, they were brought back as consultants on 3 or 4 times the rate they originally cost the company!! Efficiency epitomised

You need a union and if you have a union you need to kick it up the arse to help you stop this nonsense.

The best thing that I can say about this sort of system is that it prevents lazy managers from ranking everyone as satisfactory and allowing poor performers to languish.

The cost in penalising good performers who have the misfortune to be in a strong group of colleagues is too high. It can destroy companies.

It's a massive red flag that the company thinks that their own line managers are too shit to performance manage effectively, and that the company has no fucking clue how to train them.

My sister works for a large company who have this.
She calls it the "Strictly" performance management system.
i.e. "you've all done really well this year but someone's going to be leaving....."

It's demotivating and ends up with really good people going if they're in a department full of other really good people. If everyone else in your team gets 99% and you "only" get 98%, then you are deemed to be underperforming.....
Very very stupid imho

It's bollocks. If you've got a good team, they'll pull each other up (and equally, a bad team can pull each other down.) It's quite possible to have a team where everyone is a high performer. It's how great teams work.

My employer has used it since I started work there (10 years at least) and this is finally the last year of it. Sadly I’m going to suffer this year as I’ve just moved from being a top performer in a mediocre team to finding my feet in a tram of high performers at the next job grade up.
Next year they are going to a much simpler classification where the vast majority of people will be on target, a smaller proportion exceeding target and then there are groups for exceptional performance and under performance but these don’t have target percentages associated with them so could be none. Will see if that’s better.

Hi OP my previous employer did this and it was one major reason why I left. They operated numbers , so if you were rated 1 you were exceptionally good, down to 5 - which meant you needed performance management.

They operated a bell curve so someone needed to get a 4. Most people got a 3. You needed to get at least a 3 to get a pay rise. If you got a 4 you wouldn't get a pay rise or the very small bonus (about £250).

I got 2s when I started which gradually slipped to 3s under a stricter boss. But then I got a 4. My boss said I didn't need to worry, it was just the bell curve and "someone needed to be rated a 4" Isn't that ludicrous? But it made me feel miserable so I left.

Agree with others, lots of companies who used this (years ago! Amazed it’s still alive and kicking) stopped due to its nasty side effects.
Suggest you print out some articles and leave them on your biggest boss’s desk if you can sneak by and there’s no CCTV!
blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/microsoft-throws-stack-ranking-out-the-window

We've had this for several years at work now. However most managers still use managerial discretion on this, so it's not been strictly black and white. There are unfortunately no positive stories I could share as it is a ridiculous and unfair system.

Reading all thirst posts about it alone just gives me the rage!!!!

Yes. It's been in Education for years.

Better they rank you on the student success rates! So if you get a student who has a family crisis and under achieves, or even one who dies mid year, you won't meet your own target. And don't get me started on how the student success measure is set!

I have 1000% sympathy with anyone who has this stupidity in their life. It is utterly demoralising and allows shit management to flourish, as they can be seen to be successful in how they handle you being crap - mainly by not giving you a pay rise, bonus or even a pleasant smile!

Reminds me of Gove saying that all schools must be better than average. It's nonsense, turning colleagues into competitors. I'd be looking for a new job

Ah! You identified the main culprit so bloody quickly

I once ranked lower than the NQT I was mentoring. Mainly because I had a student who got run over and did not complete the year. SMT actually suggested I had a lot to learn from her!

And yes, I left! Now happily self employed, sole trader. I rank myself 1st, top of the heap

Surely the recruitment and management must be rubbish if there are always 10% (or whatever) of people underperforming? The aim of recruitment and management is to get the best people and motivate / manage them into working well, isn't it? So if there's always a fixed percentage of people classed as not up to par then I'd be looking at the people responsible for recruitment and management to take the hit on it.

The government department I work in got rid of forced distribution as it was proven that disabled and BME workers were routinely put in the 'bottom 10%'. The new system is also crap but no forced distribution at least.

This system was one of the main reasons I left the Government Department I worked in. It's appalling and has a serious detrimental impact on morale and teamwork.