That’s literally every company.
As a manager, you get frustrated because no matter how good an employee is,they won’t let you rate them as high as they should be, for…reasons.
Psst!
Its because they don’t want to raise their pay, and also want the employee to blame themselves for not getting the pay raise/promotion instead of their greedy employer.
But don’t tell anyone. Its a secret!
another reason I heard is it’s also another tool to give the company wiggle room to say they’re not in the best state they could be, that there’s still room for growth. under the current system, companies have to keep growing and keep appearing to have the potential for growth, or die
I was actually told during a review that they couldn’t rank me higher because then they’d have to give me more money. My boss said I deserved it, but they didn’t have the money to give it to me.
I started looking for a new job that day.
And yet they always seem to have enough money for executive bonuses and excursions…
Used to work for CenturyLink. The year they took away our Christmas bonus is the same year the company really took a nosedive.
CEO got a 20 billion million dollar bonus, enough to cover our Christmas bonuses and still give him 15 million.
Slave must work hard but slave must not be rewarded for that labour… That’s holy profit and it belongs to shareholders after top execs get their cut obvi.
This is why every day more people are finding out that providing good service is for idiots who have no self respect.
lEaDeRShIP
The priest caste of capitalism - the economists - do not understand why lowly humans will not sacrifice their lives to the Great Eternal and Unaging Corporations.
Employees are rated like Uber drivers – 5 stars is good, 4 stars neutral, anything else is bad.
But the companies forbid giving 5-star reviews.
If they didn’t, they’d have to admit their expectations are too high for the pay they are offering. Exceeding expectations is the expectation and therefore you cannot exceed expectations. And since you aren’t exceeding expectations, minimum or no raise for you.
Yeah. I thought this was the norm, so I don’t know why this is news. At my company everyone is a 3 or 4. A 5 literally means you’re going to be promoted to the next level. There’s absolutely no other way to get a 5 and promotions are obviously rare.
Same here. When I was a manager I had to give most people a 3 regardless of higher performance. We only got (1) 4 for my team of eight people. No 5 was allowed. This rating determines bonus and raises. Rate everyone for their individual performance my ass. I rotated the 4 around every year. It was a fucking joke.
Microsoft famously used stank ranking when Steve Ballmer was CEO.
A fun typo, but also oddly fitting. Man had pit stains for days.
Don’t most businesses do this?
Yes, but it’s not documented, so it’s not actionable, and the people not in management who end up getting the bonuses or raises in any given year often actively work to undermine any efforts to speak out or organize against these practices.
They pick enough people to actually get the pat on the head to keep the workers collectively destabilized and worried about what each other are saying.
I once had a manager – who was new to being in charge of reports – just outright admit in my annual review that he had to find negatives to ding me with when I asked him why no one had ever mentioned any of the issues he was bringing up to me at any time before the review. But when my closest co-workers (who were in other departments) were the ones who got the 5-star ratings and the raises, it would have just come across as sour grapes if I had said something.
It’s not that hard to socially engineer an environment where it looks like individual efforts are encouraged and rewarded while simultaneously discouraging those efforts and refusing to reward them when they pay dividends.
It’s not that hard to socially engineer an environment where it looks like individual efforts are encouraged and rewarded while simultaneously discouraging those efforts and refusing to reward them when they pay dividends.
You literally described my last gig to a tee. What everyone said and actually did couldn’t be farther apart. Basically gas lighting 101.
Correct but now we have evidence of this conduct from one of mega corps.
It is getting harder and harder to cope for normies
They’ll be fine.
A climate change induced superstorm could destroy an American bootlicker’s home, and they’d blame the local homeless population.
It’s the sunk cost/gamblers fallacy, they’ve been licking that boot their whole lives, with the promise that one day they’ll be granted access to the club for their doting licks, and god damn it, they’ll keep licking until they are!
Just keep licking… just keep licking… just keep licking…
Tru. I could avoid all of this if I quit my job and lived in my mom’s basement /s
Or unionize, independent contract, join/start a cooperative, move to a 1st world country if you have an in, etc.
We did this at target. I had 5 hourly managers under me, 4 were amazing and went above and beyond every day and 1 that was complete ass. I was assigned a number of ratings I could give, each out of 3 (3 being best). It was 3-2-2-1-1 so I one of my best had to get the worst score possible while one other at the exact same level the best. It made no sense and I hated that.
I’ve known several people in management in my industry (I’ve changed jobs a fair amount plus I’m in a consulting industry) who became managers and then either self demoted or moved over to equivalent technical roles specifically because they were forced to basically lie and say their great employees were average or even below average, couldn’t give bonuses that matched performance, and couldn’t give raises that matched performance.
It literally made them depressed to have to treat hard working people unfairly. So they stopped doing it.
Now that just brought the question to my mind: what does that mean about the people who do that and keep doing it? Are the just psychopaths? Sociopaths? Evil? Trapped?
I think the important thing to do is find the people who are forcing these dishonest review systems and challenge then directly on why they’re making managers lie about employees performance. Contact the ombudsman if they have one and point out the dishonesty.
