![]() I certainly hope this change finds its way into better products and services which are less reliant on the internal office politics of Microsoft. I can’t think of better news for the internal culture of the company. Lisa Brummel, head of human resources for the company, sent an e-mail to employees notifying them of the change today, according to my contacts. ![]() Yahoo later backed-off of stack ranking but it appears it has had a lasting effect. Not so for Yahoo, which decided in the same time period to adopt stack-ranking. Fortunately for Microsoft, stack-ranking was dismantled in late 2013/early 2014. Microsoft is announcing to its full-time employees on November 12 that there will be no more curve and no more reviewing “on the curve” at the company. This is called forced or stack ranking according to an in-depth Vanity Fair report. Stack ranking - considered by a number of current and former Microsoft employees as a major detriment, both career- and morale-wise - is no more at the company. Ill-conceived HR policies can pitch staff against one another like rats in a cage, resulting in fights, horse trading and backstabbing. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.” According to a 2012 Vanity Fair profile of Microsoft, the large majority of Microsoft employees under CEO Steve Ballmer found stack ranking to be the most destructive force within the company. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. The system-also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”-has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. Last year, Vanity Fair ran an article titled “ Microsoft’s Lost Decade” by Kurt Eichenwald:Īt the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed- every one-cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees.
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