

Thirty percent of Fortune 500 companies are said to use stacked ranking for employee evaluation. Critics of the model argue that it discourages cooperation, encourages unethical behavior and hampers staff cohesiveness and morale. Proponents of stacked ranking claim that it motivates mid-range employees to aspire to top-level ranking, increases profits and clearly identifies underperformers. Microsoft followed the stacked ranking model for years but abandoned it in 2013 in response to employee complaints about the system. Need help in getting my records stack ranked and sorted from the highest rank to bottom. Other companies that use (or did use) stacked ranking include Dow Chemical, Enron, Motorola, IBM and Yahoo. A common practice of stack-ranking in corporations is a one-size-fits-all fixed ranking scale for all the teams, which does not reflect reality - individual. GE has since moved away from the practice. According to Welch, the top employees should be further motivated with bonuses and other rewards and the bottom 10 percent should be fired. One of the best-known stacked ranking systems is former General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s Vitality Curve, which assigns high-achieving employees, which he called “A players,” to the top 20 percent, normally productive employees (B players) to the middle 70 percent level and unproductive employees (C players) to the bottom 10 percent rank.

When evaluating the staff, administrators assign individuals to those categories in such a way that the percentages assigned to each category remain constant. Stack ranking is a practice in which managers are asked to rank employees on a curve according to their performance with those at the bottom placed on. Such a model might assume a normal distribution, for example, in which 10% of employees are high achievers, 80% are satisfactory and valuable, and 10% are actually deleterious to the company. This characteristic is great because many times teams suffer from ambiguous priorities for the reason that every task or goal is treated as highly important. Therefore it is also sometimes called forced ranking. Stacked ranking is an employee evaluation method that slots a certain percentage of employees into each of several levels of performance.īecause the ranking is inherently somewhat arbitrary, the model is also sometimes referred to as a forced distribution. A great advantage of stack ranking without criteria is that it forces you to make a real choice about the priority of an item.
