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In the stack rank meetings that I was involved with, we ranked employees in the order that we would hire them to a new team. This ranking considered several thi
by BarkMore 16y ago
In the stack rank meetings that I was involved with, we ranked employees in the order that we would hire them to a new team. This ranking considered several things: productivity, ability to drive tasks to completion, quality of code, willingness to help others, personality and more. Although it was like comparing apples to oranges, there was usually a consensus on the ranking.
A useful aspect of this ranking is that it's a different perspective from the written employee review. The review measured people against goals agreed to at the beginning of the review period. The stack ranking criteria considered more of a person's contribution. An employee could suck at meeting goals, but come out high in the stack ranking because of other things the employee did.
- jonnathanson 16y agoI like the idea of a consensus assessment. Sometimes a person's value to the team is less quantifiable on paper than someone else's, but that doesn't mean it's intangible. It's usually quite tangible, and if everyone notices it (or the reverse), that's usually a good sign of the person's value-add. Not everyone is going to be the tireless codebot on the team, but that doesn't mean everyone isn't playing a critical role (Joel Spolsky obviously goes on at great lengths about this). Consensus-style reviews would probably arrive at a fair assessment of such value a lot more readily than individual writeups would. Also, a lot of people make critical contributions that just don't get noticed by the team lead because those contributions -- moral support, culture, taking time away from one's own work to assist others -- aren't boss-facing. But if you asked his or her peers, this person would get a stellar review. In situations like these, group feedback seems pretty important.