Can any manager or director weigh-in on how upper mgt demands these ratings? What do they really mean and are they an effort to avoid severance pay?
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So you want equity, not equality. You’re never going to have a work ethic.
@vqlw, no, it's called not understanding basic statistics when you take a small group of people and expect a normal distribution after firing the low performers for years.
Child, it is called competition and it makes everybody on the team better.
There are no participation trophies with everyone a winner in the real world.
Ranking employees is not an issue. Forcing BE ratings on good employees just because they don't rank as high IS an issue and is unfair, unethical and poor management.
I have been told we have to have a BE at year end PM.
It’s RANKINGS dude, forced RANKINGS. The process of ranking employees helps the manager in determining your ratings.
They walk among us…
Forced ranking (not ratings… come on people, get engaged) have nothing to do with avoiding severance pay.
Forced Rankings are an excellent way to promote and reward hard working over achievers. They’re also an excellent way to understand which employees simply aren’t cutting it.
Termination without severance (actually without Sub) has everything to do with employees willfully rejecting repeated requests to come to work and do their jobs.
I worked in separations for years at the company, I do not know how the ratings are decided but from what I am told there is a quota for certain employees to be rated lower. After receiving a corrective action separation agreement I see why, seems like they are doing these to give tenured employees less of a separation package if you disagree with anything.
Word of the wise, if your employed at Bny, get out before they do that to you as well.
@4nzl, it's simply not true that forced ratings are better for good workers. There's been several times I've received EE under a couple categories and ME in a few yet my overall rating was ME. That's impossible but they justified it by saying they couldn't give me an EE without giving one of my co-workers a BE. I usually spend my bonus on taco bell.
I just love it that everything true here is downvoted. People are so bizarre.
Is the unification church the one that worships Tom Cruise?
There's absolutely a forced ranking.
The Process:
- Managers are provided guidance as to the distribution
- Managers provide indicative ratings upwards for review.
- Indicative ratings are calibrated across the division/unit. Thus, it's possible for a manager to have more exceeds than recommended guidance if there are other parts of the division that have more BEs.
- Some areas will conduct open calibration discussions with key managers to assess across the division.
- Based on final calibration the manager will receive either approval to begin staff conversations OR the manager will be asked to revise the distribution if more of a particular rating category is desired.
We are told we need some below folks. How it works is we give out our ratings, our recommendations for exceeds are shot down, then we are told we need to
Downgrade some of our meets to below. None of us are willing to do that at first. Then some of us cave and the numbers are met. It is similar to how the unification church gets people to join. You are just tired of hearing it, so you give people up. Some managers refuse, then they are let go in the next round. The below folks are let go the following Spring. It’s constant and will never end, so you learn to embrace it. It’s a sad way of life.
Contrary to the last few posts, forced rankings are NOT better for more productive workers. Managers hate to give BE ratings to average employees who are doing just fine so that severely limits how many EEs they can give.
When I was managing a team, my director would come to me at the start of performance management season and tell me who on my team was to get a BE rating.
Part of this was to ensure that his department met the quota for BE ratings. The other part was to ensure that certain employees didn't get the same BE rating for multiple periods, which would trigger a layoff for them.
I’ve moved to a team with a coworker that is in everyone’s business and asked around to find out how everyone was ranked last year. I dread working with her on any projects since she withholds half the information I need to try to make me slip up and look bad instead of upskilling to get ahead. She does this with the whole team and I’ve never seen this in the larger departments I worked in. I see the merit to ranking staff to award high performers but it leads to this stuff too.
Forcing ratings is actually terrible for collaboration by the way and also for teamwork. People have no incentive to properly or fully train others or share everything. People also become much more sneaky and the “blame game” becomes rancid.
Let’s also remember if they can’t figure out who to rank as below they will randomly pick someone and in some cases they have to fabricate things you did or didn’t do to force the performance evaluation to match their system. That’s unfortunately very common in my area.
Bottom Line: if you are bad at your job you would actually love forced ratings because all you have to do is consistently blame someone else and you’ll probably skate along fine.
And yet I have paperwork on it from Mellon in 2000. It dealt with Forced Rankings and bonuses. It’s either that we’re in the Twilight Zone or that you don’t keep your paperwork.
The weaker your effort and performance, the more that you dislike forced rankings.
For poor workers, the answer is to leave and find a union job.
American Football isn’t an example at all. It’s a LEAGUE, not a team, and the goal for the league is parity across teams. If it wasn’t, there would be no games worth watching, but instead we have an “Any given Sunday scenario” that makes the NFL exciting.
The NFL teams compete in a league, but their real competition is baseball, hockey, NBA & college basketball etc. Because the teams in the league work this way, after the Superbowl, they actually do bolster the weakest teams with a draft and they do equalize talent this way.
It’s “forced Rankings”, not forced Ratings”.
Note: this happened last year, but the story shows how disorganized this place is.
My manager was completely unresponsive for mid-year ratings and how to cascade down to the team, but they were due sooner than later. so I put one employee as "meets" which is consistent with her previous performances. Then a day later, I found out I had to lay her off two Mondays later.
Part of the reason for force rankings; I think is keeping a few deserving employees below expectations helps the bank to save quite a bit of money per year. If you are BE they don’t have to give you a raise. Imagine how much money they save per year . I think they usually keep the majority of employees that are BE because they know they really are good deserving workers. But due to the forced ranking, each team need a fall guy every so often.
In reference to this comment:
"If you’re any good, you want forced rankings. It’s the only fair HR process that I know of, and it beats the heck out of rewarding D.E.I. hires based on nothing but nonessential attributes."
Let's take American Football as an example. Say you have two teams under your control. One of them wins the Superbowl, and the other hasn't won a game all season.
After the Superbowl, you tell both team managers that they have to rank 15% of their team below expectations and fire them.
So now your best team loses great players, and your worst team retains 85% of its useless players. That's how forced ranking works.
BNYM only offers severance to key employees with employment contracts. At will employees (99% of employees) may or may not receive SUB depending upon why they were displaced.
You do not want forced rankings if you’re good… unless you are on a lousy team.
Do you work on a team with other high performers? You’re going to be locked in battle for one of the one or two Exceeds rankings. And your coworkers know it and they will be doing whatever they can (campaigning to get out on high-profile projects, badmouthing you, undermining you) to beat you out.
I am a tough but fair manager but the system didn’t allow me to fairly rank and reward my people, time and again. I’m good at differentiating performance but the system groups three-quarters of all people into one category: Achieved. That’s not differentiation.
Smart companies who tried forced rankings dumped the system ages ago.
Not true. BNYM only adopted the system once Charlie arrived.
People…
We had Forced Rankings at Mellon combined with bonuses since 2000, and fortunately BONY adopted this system after acquiring Mellon. Forced Rankings reward good workers and penalize poor workers. Most productive people love it and nonproductive people hate it.
If you’re any good, you want forced rankings. It’s the only fair HR process that I know of, and it beats the heck out of rewarding D.E.I. hires based on nothing but nonessential attributes.
Yes, it makes sense to differentiate performance. Of course.
HOWEVER… the way it is done at BNYM is counterproductive.
Example: if you’re on a team of 10 and 3-4 of you are knocking it out of the park, the system does not allow your manager to give Exceeds to all 3 or 4. Only 1 or 2. The others will be rated Achieved along with 75% of the employee population.
And if the entire team is achieving expectations, the manager will have to dig deep and find a reason to rate someone Below, even if that person outperforms most other teams.
No one wants to manage employees under that system.
I have it on good authority that senior managers have been told they need to rate a certain percentage of their subordinates poorly, even if their entire team is meeting or exceeding expectations.
Ranking employees is essential. How else can you ensure that the best employees are compensated appropriately? Forced Rankings only means that the manager must rank all in order… no ties. Unfortunately people obsess about those on the bottom, but nobody winds up on the bottom without good reason. There are no teams with identical performers.
They don’t really care about rankings within any group as long as you keep your exceeds to a minimum - as a manager you kind of want to do that anyway as any additional $ you give to the exceeds takes $ away from all the rest of staff in your group. And of course the demand is 1 person per group with a ‘off track’ and at year end 1 ‘partially meets’ or below expectation. They’re moving away from giving SUB pay to these people if they decide those people need to ‘go’.