Very wise comments. These systems might work if performance was unambiguous, such as in a track and field 100 yard dash competition. You can definitely rank the participants in that race, provided they were all in good health that day. However, can you compare the sprinters to the distance runners? If you cut the slowest in each group, did you really cut the lowest two performers for the team as a whole? If you include enough small groups in the overall cutting process, you will make several wrong cuts and keep some performers who werent’ as good.
When you start ranking people who do tasks that are difficult to measure, such as design or innovation work, you start falling into decisions made on the basis of liking someone. Someone might not be an extrovert, but could be an excellent, innovative engineer. Then there are people who work on pharmaceutical development and who may take many years to identify a successful drug. How are you going to clearly assess their performance over the early years?
These types of systems are for managers who want simple systems for making tough decisions, thus absolving the managers of personal responsibility for making the decision. HR managers like these systems ‘cause they are simple, quantitative systems and require no real thought. HR managers don’t even work alongside the employees being evaluated.
Excellent comment. Just struck me that these sorts of "by the numbers" approaches to management have a lot in common with "zero tolerance" policies in schools and elsewhere. They relieve weak managers of the responsibility for making decisions.
I recognize the difficulty when the performance measurement is ambiguous at best, but how do you rate their performance and how do you remove the real slackers from the workforce? How do you justify giving one employee 4% and another one 2% or 0% raise (assuming you can even give out raises)?
I guess it's the eternal question in the business world.