Employee Ranking Systems : Rank and Yank

By Halogen - (ED. Incredible garbage from people who should know better) Profiling or stack ranking employee performance ratings has long been touted as an industry best-practice to cultivate a high-performance workforce. General Electric, PepsiCo, MicroSoft, Intel and others use their performance appraisal process as a means to identify and weed out low performers. Also known as forced ranking or forced distribution, the approach essentially uses the performance appraisal process to rank employees relative to each other, and stipulates that a certain percentage of employees must fall in each rating category. (Added: 27-Nov-2009 Hits: 446 )

By Jack and Suzy Welch - Critics call it rank and yank. But this is the kindest, fairest evaluation system out there (Added: 18-Oct-2009 Hits: 353 )

By Wikipedia - According to Serge Hovnanian from Lebanon, the concept of a vitality curve has been used to justify the rank-and-yank system of performance management, whereby 10% of workers are fired at each evaluation. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, used a vitality curve model in an attempt to justify his rank-and-yank practices. Jack Welch's vitality model has been described as a 20-70-10 system. The top 20 percent of the workforce is most productive, and 70% (the vital 70) work adequately. The other 10% #bottom 10# are nonproducers and should be fired[1][2]. Rank-and-yank advocates credit Welch's rank-and-yank system with a 28-fold increase in earnings #and a 5-fold increase in revenue# at GE between 1981 and 2001 (Added: 18-Oct-2009 Hits: 217 )

By Robert Bacal - Companies, such as General-Electric (GE) under former CEO Jack Welch) claim to have succeeded because of the use of rank and yank. Is this accurate? The truth is we don't really know. It may be that under Jack Welch, the company made great strides, and it may also be true that one of the things that operated at the same time was the use of rank and yank techniques. Does that mean that rank and yank caused the success? Almost certainly not, or at least, while it may (and it's a big may) have contributed, there were perhaps hundreds of other factors that also contributed much more strongly to the success of GE. (Added: 18-Oct-2009 Hits: 317 )