>position and under a lot of stress. To some, getting a
>university degree is very much like acquiring that
>Mercedes. I have seen some of the students in this
>category suffer because it is not where their talents
>lie. To add insult to injury, they all want an A. I
NY Times, March 19, 2001
Companies Turn to Grades, and Employees Go to Court
By REED ABELSON
An increasingly popular technique for evaluating employees is prompting
lawsuits charging discrimination at three big companies.
At issue is the ranking of managers, professionals and sometimes
lower-level employees from best to worst, or grading them on a bell curve,
and then using that ranking to help determine pay and sometimes whether to
fire someone.
In their suits, all filed over the last year or so, employees at Microsoft,
Ford Motor and Conoco say the rating systems are unfair because they favor
some groups of employees over others: white males over blacks and women,
younger managers over older ones and foreign citizens over Americans.
A growing number of companies are turning to grading systems, also known as
forced rankings or distributions, as a way of making sure managers evaluate
employees honestly and make clearer distinctions among them. At companies
that do not compare employees with one another this way, nearly every
employee can come away feeling above average, like the children of Lake
Wobegon. But under the grading system, managers are forced to identify some
people as low performers.
At General Electric, for example, supervisors identify the top 20 percent
and bottom 10 percent of their managerial and professional employees every
year. The bottom 10 percent are not likely to stay.
As John F. Welch Jr., General Electric's chief executive, wrote last month
to shareholders, "A company that bets its future on its people must remove
that lower 10 percent, and keep removing it every year - always raising the
bar of performance and increasing the quality of its leadership."
Ranking or grading employees is also common at technology companies like
Cisco Systems and Hewlett- Packard. But recently the concept has been
catching on more broadly, according to management consultants. One reason
is that as the economy slows, companies often lay off employees. Cisco, for
example, announced earlier this month that it would let go as many as 5,000
workers - and would use grading as one way to identify people to lay off.
"Companies are playing their version of `Survivor,' " said David Thomas, a
professor at the Harvard Business School.
Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/19/business/19GRAD.html?searchpv=site01
Louis Proyect
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