How is everyone feeling about their mid year review and the new calibration? How are we feeling about the bottom 10% situation?
6 replies (most recent on top)
@wc This also worries me, the timing of mid years, and knowing ‘whether you’ve been placed’ (GB words, not mine) by the end of July really bothers me!!
It’s too convenient that if you’re bottom 10%, and therefore on a PIP, they don’t have to pay you redundancy (in the UK anyway)!! No EOI, performance management being reintroduced & graded just weeks before the cull smells a bit off to me?!?
@s9 This is what concerns me. My manager said I’m doing a great job. Then said but this is not an indication of your year-end rating and you have to keep doing a great job. It felt very weird. The whole bottom 10% process makes performance reviews feel like a threat.
Morale in my team has been hit for sure. People being told they’re on track to be bottom 10% at the end of the year “but don’t worry it’s relative”
Mid year rating is not recorded anywhere, your line manager can say one thing and mark you down as something else end of the year. Ive heard some LM giving good rating to keep people till the end of the year until they are replaced with someone in BTC…
@OP I think a lot of people are feeling the same way, if someone has been coasting for years, then yes, this new process should expose that. But the real test is whether leadership actually uses the data properly, or whether they hide behind “calibration” to justify decisions they’ve already made.
The bottom10% approach only works if it’s based on genuine performance signals, not politics, visibility bias, or who shouts the loudest in meetings. If it turns into a forced distribution exercise dressed up as “fairness”, then it’s just BE all over again with a new label.
People aren’t afraid of accountability — they’re afraid of arbitrary box‑ticking masquerading as accountability. If the company wants trust, it needs to show that the process is about performance, not quotas.
If you have to ask what a menu item costs, you can’t afford it.