A wave has moved across corporate America and the world to perform bell curved ranking of employees across organizations.

In the past, we took goals and defined goals specific to the role that people were in. Then came cross-team collaboration and cross-training

which was meant to ensure stability if a team member were to leave or be terminated. Today, we've applied a logic to our corporate organizations

that is both unfair to the employee and unfair to the manager who manages the team. What many corporations have done is apply a bell curve

philosophy when ranking employee productivity. What this means is that when you have 5 team members, and they meet all their goals for the

year and were all matched in terms of productivty that you have to apply a bell curve to rank them either across the organization as a whole or

at the team level. The intention of these programs has been to ensure that proper rankings have been employed and also propel the organization

to higher competition and output amongst employees

The trouble with this approach is that after 3 years applying it to your organization you've forced all managers to cull at least 1-2 people which may

have had lower productivity scorings that their peers and you've run out of "laggars" on your team. After the third year of implementation of this sort

of program your managers are now forced to terminate a perfectly well performing employee simply because they may not wish to rank their best

employee at a lower level. This is unfair especially when you have equally performing employees in your team all outperforming expectations.

As corporate citizens we need to change this concept slightly to make it more effective.

I propose that if you have such a ranking system, you need to change your program to make it fair and here's how.

Review your ranking system and how you are applying your employee rankings. If you are forcing your management into a bell curve ranking, you

need to make it fair so that the only effect is on the bonus received by the employee and does not result in performance improvement plans or termination.

Augementing the program in this way ensures the employee and the management staff can both perform a good job and at the same time enhance productivity

of their team. Most organizations will find they raise the morale of staff by utilizing this approach and the result will be a fairer stack ranking system.