Forced Ranking: Another Way to Evaluate Employees
30 March 2011
Read by 2240 persons
Each employee is rated by a committee made up of managers from different departments. A method widely used by Anglo-Saxon companies. A person is evaluated based on their overall skills and ranked against colleagues whose positions have the same weight in the company.
Forced ranking, whatever the name, is a rating technique that appeared a few years ago and is mainly used in Anglo-Saxon countries. Simply put, it consists of ranking employees according to their individual performance, based on a pre-defined distribution (20% high-performing, 10% low-performing, 70% efficient). The choice of this distribution is based on a statistical law represented by a Gaussian curve.
The principles are simple. The first is not to limit evaluations by department, but rather to use the leverage of inter-departmental transversality. In short, committees made up of managers from each department will evaluate all employees.
Diagrammatically, it works in four steps. Firstly, HR divides the employees to be evaluated into several groups based on the weight of their position and not on the job title.
Secondly, each manager must have a meeting with the employee to define the year's successes and failures...
The evaluation meeting, the third step, aims to rank members of a group of employees with comparable job weights in descending order. To do this, each manager must put forward valid arguments to place their employees, or those of others, in the top places and so on down to the bottom places.
Finally, to be validated, each ranking requires a quorum of all managers.
Why the choice of transversality?
An employee who performs well in one department may do so to the detriment of the overall performance of the company; that is why they must be evaluated by all the heads of all departments. The advantages of such a method are numerous.
The method facilitates internal mobility
It allows an employee to be evaluated by other managers, allowing them to know their performance, which facilitates internal mobility.
Furthermore, decisions made collegially by a group of managers, when good, are more flattering than those made by a single manager. However, an average, or even bad, evaluation is easier for a manager to announce when (let's be honest) they are “hiding behind a group decision”.
The forced ranking meeting also allows each manager to defend the place of their “protégés” in the best positions in the ranking, by putting forward concrete results, which are better than ticks on criteria in the classic rating system. They will have to fight against the arguments and counter-arguments of other managers who are also trying to take the top spots.
Another beneficial point is that there is no budget allocated per department, but a budget allocated to high performers... and that's a big difference for the latter's pay slip! This helps to achieve the objective set by any rating system: to attract, retain and encourage the best performers.
Published March 30, 2011
Posted online March 30, 2011
Lavieeco.com
Forced ranking, whatever the name, is a rating technique that appeared a few years ago and is mainly used in Anglo-Saxon countries. Simply put, it consists of ranking employees according to their individual performance, based on a pre-defined distribution (20% high-performing, 10% low-performing, 70% efficient). The choice of this distribution is based on a statistical law represented by a Gaussian curve.
The principles are simple. The first is not to limit evaluations by department, but rather to use the leverage of inter-departmental transversality. In short, committees made up of managers from each department will evaluate all employees.
Diagrammatically, it works in four steps. Firstly, HR divides the employees to be evaluated into several groups based on the weight of their position and not on the job title.
Secondly, each manager must have a meeting with the employee to define the year's successes and failures...
The evaluation meeting, the third step, aims to rank members of a group of employees with comparable job weights in descending order. To do this, each manager must put forward valid arguments to place their employees, or those of others, in the top places and so on down to the bottom places.
Finally, to be validated, each ranking requires a quorum of all managers.
Why the choice of transversality?
An employee who performs well in one department may do so to the detriment of the overall performance of the company; that is why they must be evaluated by all the heads of all departments. The advantages of such a method are numerous.
The method facilitates internal mobility
It allows an employee to be evaluated by other managers, allowing them to know their performance, which facilitates internal mobility.
Furthermore, decisions made collegially by a group of managers, when good, are more flattering than those made by a single manager. However, an average, or even bad, evaluation is easier for a manager to announce when (let's be honest) they are “hiding behind a group decision”.
The forced ranking meeting also allows each manager to defend the place of their “protégés” in the best positions in the ranking, by putting forward concrete results, which are better than ticks on criteria in the classic rating system. They will have to fight against the arguments and counter-arguments of other managers who are also trying to take the top spots.
Another beneficial point is that there is no budget allocated per department, but a budget allocated to high performers... and that's a big difference for the latter's pay slip! This helps to achieve the objective set by any rating system: to attract, retain and encourage the best performers.
Published March 30, 2011
Posted online March 30, 2011
Lavieeco.com
