DailyDirt: About those TPS Reports...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Dec 19th 2013 5:00pm — Joyce Hung

It's probably safe to say that most managers and employees look forward to annual performance reviews as much as they would a painful root canal. Some companies like Adobe have eliminated them altogether, in favor of less formal check-in conversations throughout the year that focus on ongoing feedback. Here are some other companies that are changing the way they evaluate their workers.

Microsoft has gotten rid of its "stack ranking" employee evaluation process. Many former and current Microsoft employees consider stack ranking -- reviewing on a curve -- to be detrimental to both career and morale. From now on, Microsoft will be evaluating employees based more on teamwork and collaboration. [url]
"People analytics" -- a big-data-driven approach to evaluating employees -- is changing the way companies hire, fire, and promote. There are plenty of big companies that have dedicated analytics teams in their HR departments -- Google, HP, Intel, General Motors, Procter & Gamble -- but even smaller companies are getting into the game. So, beware that no matter where you work, they're watching you. [url]
Yahoo's new employee evaluation process may finally be yielding its first results. The new approach attempts to mimic the more data-driven process used at Google, where CEO Marissa Mayer spent her entire career before becoming Yahoo's latest leader. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: employment, hr, jobs, management, organizational behavior

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out_of_the_blue, 19 Dec 2013 @ 5:32pm

"Managers" are flunkies specially trained to pacify laborers.
I notice you don't mention Amazon, or Wal-Mart, or multi-billionaire Warren Buffet.

Walmart's War Against Unions -- and the U.S. Laws That Make It Possible

So what's the secret to Walmart's "success" in remaining 100 percent nonunion? In short, it's the corporation's thorough exploitation of our nation's anemic labor laws.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-b-gutman/walmart-labor-laws_b_3390994.html

Just one example. Of course, most of you have been taught that laborers taking less and plutocrats taking more is actually GOOD for laborers. You've been taught that asking for a dollar more an hour will bring down the economy, while The Rich have no shame scraping off 1.5 MILLION AN HOUR, more than honest laborers will get in a lifetime of useful productive work (and that's EVERY hour of EVERY day):

Warren Buffett gained more wealth than any other U.S. billionaire, adding $37 million a day, according to one study.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101282625

This inequality can't go on, people. The inevitable result is that those people will think they're a higher species annoited by god, and succeed in bringing back literal feudalism. We need real economists like Robert Reich to again argue pulling down the "economic royalists", not Ivy League weenies who only run puff pieces on Google's "transparency".
Entire schools of management are devoted to minimizing your income so as to scrape off more for The Rich. Why should the 99% NOT tax away unearned income that will only be wasted in conspicuous consumption, and instead put it to public purposes?
The Rich will always seize more power until stopped. The only non-violent way to stop them is with steeply progressive tax rates, especially on unearned income.

13:29:02[o-842-2]
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Ninja (profile), 20 Dec 2013 @ 2:56am

And thus good employees are being lost because they have weird behaviors (to the average person) outside the workplace. Sure some sort of selection criteria needs to be enacted and followed but I think we are going too far.
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- DannyB (profile), 20 Dec 2013 @ 7:00am
  
  Re:
  Enlightened employers have figured out that the very thing that makes certain people socially awkward, the ability to obsessively hyperfocus, is exactly what makes them exceptionally good at particular kinds of tasks that our high tech world now places in high demand.
  
  Little things, that are a very minor expense, go a loooong way. Free diet coke. Pizza. Etc.
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DannyB (profile), 20 Dec 2013 @ 7:03am

Microsoft stacked ranking
Glad they got rid of it. But it is too late. The brain drain has already occurred. It's like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Dec 2013 @ 9:02am

Comparative Rankings
Comparative rankings, also known as stacked rankings, just mostly destroy morale and pit employees against each other. Employees at such places soon learn that the worse they can make others look, the higher they will score in comparison and begin to look for covert ways to sabotage others. It really gets to be cutthroat.

Not to mention that the "goals" used in the evaluations are somewhat arbitrarily made up in the first place with the goal of finding excuses to fire people. Managers in such companies are then often expected to fire a certain percentage of people each quarter. In companies with lots of good people, this means that good people are regularly fired in order to meet management's turnover goals. This tends to turn the employees into a bunch of terrified backstabbers. And in management's eyes, this is good.
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