About the ranking of employees

How to rank employees? Just to mention and example: in the last several years Yahoo’s Quarterly Performance Review has extensively been discussed not only in the business/leadership literature, but in the popular magazines, too. It is very difficult or impossible to find objective measures to promote gifted and lay off inappropriate employees. Still, we know that employees are different in terms of their ability, performance, so we should understand the challenge to rate and rank people. The link is eighteen months old, still it is worth to read.

6 thoughts on “About the ranking of employees”

  1. Peter, this is not specifically on ranking of employees, but I wonder what you think about Dijksterhuis’s studies concerning intuitive vs deliberative performance in ranking?

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  2. Ranking employees seems to be a particularly pointless activity. Employees have different roles, and even when in the same category they almost always have distinct work situations (projects, coworkers, etc). In all but the most structured (and increasingly obsolete) activities (e.g., assembly line work), it is all but impossible to objectively quantify all measures of outputs. The real question for the actual purposes of hiring, firing and promoting decisions is whether the employee is (capable of) doing the job up to a certain desired level of performance or not.

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