Ranking Employees

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I had a temp factory job a bit back and they asked me to come back this week for three days, because they had a special project.

Well that this project consisted of was that every employee in the factory was being reviewed. Having been a temp they moved me around every day to a new line so I was able to quickly jump in and fill in for the factory employee while she/he went for his/her review.

OK so this took three days.

But here’s the thing, as part of the review they “rank” their employees from top to bottom. So in addition to your own personal rank you were ranked among the others as well.

So I would overhear the employee come back to the line and the others would ask, “How’d you do,” and the employee would say something like "I got a 2% raise, and I got a score of 4.1 (out of 5) and I was ranked 17.

And the others would say “Ha, ha I’m better than you I’m ranked 15.” Or “how can you be a better worker than me, I was ranked 35 and I KNOW I’m better than you.”

So here’s my question have any of you all ever been ranked like that at a job?

Now I was only a temp for three days so I don’t know HOW they’re ranked. I asked a few people and they said it was everyone overall in the factory that was a punch worker (as opposed to salaries)

My job reviews have always been either totally words or just a personal rank on a scale of 1 to 5 (or whatever) for a list of question.

I never got ranked against others.

Has this happend to anyone else here?

I like one guy who pointed out, “I don’t care what they rank me at, as long as I got my raise. After all someone has to be last. It doesn’t mean your bad or not doing your job, just that someone else for some reason does it faster.”

2

They were privately told their scores, and some chose to share? Or the scores were published. If the former, that doesn’t sound like a good idea. If the latter, that sounds disastrous. Either way, this seems to lead to lower morale in general.

3

It sounds like a good way to cause discord and dissension with the workers. They should have at least made sure rankings were to be kept private.

4

I’ve never heard of ranking employees like that. I’ve worked in factory conditions before and we were just given raises based on merit and attendance by our direct supervisor. I KNOW! What a weird way to get raises, huh?

5

The only time I ever encountered such a thing was in the military - I recall our pilots in the squadron were ranked against each other, although I don’t know what criteria were used. It does seem rather juvenile to me, but for them the statistics and rankings were important.

But outside of that and sports, I never knew of it being done.

6

When I was working, we were ranked all right. Not officially, of course, but when I got 30 hours and another guy got 25 and still another guy got 17, we knew our rankings. :wink:

7

I’ve worked in two companies where they did “ratings”, but not sure if I’ve ever seen “rankings”. Ratings would be to group employees into a bell curve distribution with 4 or 5 groups. That practice was stupid and statistically insignificant - they would try it on populations smaller than 10, then work up to the broader population. Ranking from 1 to N is even stupider. Both would be condemned by Demming as counter productive.

8

The rankings were not published. I assume they were supposed to keep their ranking to themselves. No one forced anyone to tell, but this factory is full of gossips and people dying to share every detail of their life with you.

I just know what I heard and since people were just talking, there was no way to even tell if they were lying, except if someone said “I was ranked 14,” and you knew they must be lying because you were ranked 14.

Because I was a temp, (through an agency) I only knew what I heard or was told.

I just never heard of a system of ranking employees.

Kind of reminded me of grade school band where you had to try out for first chair in trombone or second chair in saxaphone. Or when we had spelling bee ranks in 2nd grade.

9

I’ve heard it’s common in some City firms (maybe the big banks? it was a while ago I was having the conversation, so I’m hazy on the details) in London, and so presumably in their equivalents in the US and other places, for employees to be ranked. I didn’t like the idea when I heard about it then - I can’t see it doing anything other than demoralising the people who are ranked last. And someone always has to be last.

10

And those people are typically fired.

Banks, consulting firms, law firms and other highly competetive professional services companies typically rank their employees within their peer group. Having sat in on these performance review sessions, I find them petty, offensive and unfair. Rarely is there any sort of objective ranking by any measurable performance metric. They are simply popularity contests.

11

I used to work in the training department for a large insurance company, and we were ranked. However, while the managers obviously knew, no one ever told the individual worker-bees what his or her rank was (and indeed, doing so would probably have been grounds for immediate dismissal).

AFAIK, the ranking was used only to determine the size of an employee’s raise and any additional merit bonus they could be given. For example, the higher ups would determine that the top 20% (below a certain level) of every team would get a special achievement bonus - those were determined to be the top performers. If you had 5 team members under that given level on a team, then one of them got the special bonus. (Above that level, other incentives were in place for bonuses and rewards.)

I guess they thought that it worked. I got one of the bonuses one year, so it worked for me. In this system, theoretically no employee should have known what their ranking was, but it seemed that word mostly got around anyway.