Yahoo takes a big step in their human resource management as managers are now asked to rank employees on a bell curve and lay off the lowest-scoring employees.
Bell curve ranking methods are an extremely unfavorable way of measuring employee performance because these ratings is quite subjective. This curving method also risks the danger of demotivating intrinsic motivators, which are the strongest motivators for workplace efficacy and efficiency, and here’s why: A bell curve averages out all the people in the middle, highlighting the highest-scoring and the lowest-scoring performers. This means that although everyone in the middle might be doing a good job and showing great work ethic, their bell curved position only tells them that they are mediocre at their jobs.
A fair and equitable method of measurement would be one that focuses on encouragement and praise rather than fear and punishment. The human resources department of a company succeeds when employees want to do extra tasks outside of their job descriptions to impress and benefit the company, referred to as organizational citizenship behavior.
However, if it was so easy for companies to encourage both rigorous innovation and competition yet create a stress-free environment for employees to relax at work, then human resource issues would not exist. As my organization behavior professor Tracey Gurton says, Common sense is not always Common Action. I think the key to encouraging employee performance would not be trying to quantify their work but to have managers take time to consistently review and recognize good performance. In this way, employees will keep repeating the things they are doing well in and take the company to where it needs to be in the next five years.
Importance of Intrinsic Rewards by Daniel Pink