It's that time of year, as a senior engineer I have been brought into many conversations around ranking and rating employees and team members. I know every company has a mechanism to do this. We're using a variation of 9-box and I find it lacking on the intangibles such as Personality/Interpersonal in addition to the performance and potential. Which are the best ways you've seen reviews managed.. 300k; 15; CA
If a system has an over reliance on metrics, it is dead already. There is no way to fight back. E.g. a person could have delivered something important but has a very low number of commits or other such nonsense metrics. The best way I've seen is one where there is no stack ranking of people but of projects. And then, managers are asked to increase resources for higher ranked projects. For people reviews, you just rate if they are doing well enough for the project they are mapped to. Some projects are harder than others, so people mapped to harder projects are expected to be slower, have lower metrics etc. Others are easy projects and so people mapped to them are expected to be faster. More importantly, the real question is if the projects are going ahead and if not, how can the entire management team help. With these baseline expectations set, rate the engineers. You can use any rubric for this, as long as engineers were informed of the rubric. Ideally, the rubric has something for personability. If not, managers will need to bring this up with upper management - that the rubric is flawed. If someone is getting a lower rating, have a 1:1 with that engineer to get details to have them go up in ratings. After this exercise, just distribute the bonuses. If this ratings system is going to be used to cut people, beware of engineers losing trust in management. Every engineer is working hard - it's your flawed rating system that is forcing cuts.
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By not following the rules. But only enough for it to be helpful and not destructive. I.e. clear bias vs fighting for someone because they uplevel the entire team in ways that metrics can't track.