A recent article about Microsoft’s organizational culture has sparked a heated discussion about the tech giant’s notorious employee ranking system in particular, and employee benchmarking in general. The article, which was published in Vanity Fair magazine, discusses Microsoft’s “stack ranking” system, which forces unit managers to declare a certain percentage of their subordinates as top performers, good performers, average, and poor.
Is Ranking Employees Good for Them?
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Ranking employees tends not to look at the big picture and can be manipulated. It has been my experience to have yearly assessments completed by the Federal Government and more recently by the State Government in two different vocations. In both cases the rater frequently was tasked with many things, one of which was my assessment. I never had poor assessments but I felt that the rater did not have an indepth knowledge of what I had accomplished during the past year. I felt that the rater was very susceptible to the political situation at work.