Microsoft is doing away with its controversial stack-ranking system. The ‘stack ranking’ process has long rated employees on a fixed curve, which has led to lower compensation to some employees even in cases where their managers might have felt they deserved more. According to the Verge, for years Microsoft has used stack ranking that effectively encourages workers to compete against each other. Stack ranking is a process where each business unit’s management team has to review employees’ performance and rank a certain percentage of them as top performers, or as average or poorly performing, the report said. Former Microsoft employees have claimed the process leads to colleagues competing with each other, especially when some employees in a group of individuals need to be given poor reviews to match the method. According to an internal memo sent to Microsoft staff today, the process is being axed. Microsoft HR chief Lisa Brummel issued the memo, saying that this is a fundamentally new approach to performance and development designed to promote new levels of teamwork and agility for breakthrough business impact. In the memo, Brummel said that there will be ‘no more curve’ so that managers will be free to allocate rewards to teams and individuals as they see fit. (ANI)
