Business

商业报道

Motivating workers

激励员工

Ranked and yanked

评级与封杀
 

Firms that keep grading their staff ruthlessly may not get the best from them.

那些总是无情地把员工分个三六九等的公司或许并不能得到最好的效果。

Mayer: who's for the chop next?

Mayer：谁是下一个要开除的？

IT IS a brutal management technique in which bosses grade their employees' performance along a vitality curve and sack those who fall into the lowest category.

老板们对雇员们的表现按照活力曲线来评定，然后把最差的一些炒掉鱿鱼的管理方法实在非常残酷。

Known as ranking and yanking, it had its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s.

这个被称为评级与封杀的做法在19世纪80和90年代达到了全盛期。

In America its popularity faded somewhat after it was seen to have contributed to the fall of Enron.

在美国，实施该策略的公司因其被认为促成了安然公司的破产曾大量减少，

Now it is back in the headlines.

不过现在这个字眼又重新见诸报端。

On November 8th All Things D, a tech-industry website, reported that Yahoo staff are increasingly unhappy about a quarterly performance review introduced last year by the new boss, Marissa Mayer.

在11月8日，技术产业网站All Things D报道说，雅虎的员工们对于新老板Marissa Mayer去年引入的季度表现评估正日渐不满。

The grading exercise is said to have cost 600 of them their jobs in recent weeks.

据说，这种评估行为导致几周内就有600人没了工作。

Four days later, Microsoft announced that its own, equally unpopular system was being scrapped.

四天以后，微软宣布废除它自己同样不受欢迎的评价系统。

In a memo, Lisa Brummel, Microsoft's head of human resources, said there would be no more ratings and no more curve.

在一份备忘录上，微软人力资源主管Lisa Brummel说道，再也不会有打分和曲线了。

The firm would implement a fundamentally new approach, designed to encourage teamwork and collaboration.

微软将会启用一个用来鼓励团结合作的崭新的方法。

Many firms, from Amazon to PwC, still use some version of what management theorists also call stack ranking to sort the sheep from the goats in their workforce.

从亚马逊到普华永道的许多公司依然在使用许多管理理论家称作员工排序的方法来挑选出不够格的员工。

However, many of them enforce it more flexibly than seems to have been the case at Microsoft or Yahoo.

然而，其中大多数的公司在实行时要比微软和雅虎这些公司有弹性的多。

Even General Electric, which pioneered the technique during the uncompromising reign of Neutron Jack Welch, has since softened its approach.

甚至在中子弹杰克韦尔奇治下首先采用这种管理方法的通用电气近年来也软化了实行方法。

The reason such gradings have not died out entirely is because employers still need to find ways to fairly evaluate their employees and have a basis for compensation differences, says Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School.

这种评分策略没有完全消失的原因在于老板们仍然需要找到公平评估雇员的方法并据此确定报酬差异。

This is especially true when there is a wide gap between the remuneration of top performers and the rest.

当顶级员工的工资和其他人差的很多的时候，这尤其显得很重要。

To avoid lawsuits claiming unfair discrimination, firms need to be able to show they have a clear basis for decisions on pay and bonuses.

这话来自于哈佛商学院的Robert Kaplan。为了避免不公待遇和员工歧视的诉讼，公司在决定酬劳和福利的时候需要有明确的根据。

Ranking and yanking is more logical in investment banks, law and accountancy firms and big consultancies:

评级和封杀在投资银行、法律和会计公司以及大型咨询公司这些行业中要更合理一些：

their business model is, in a sense, built on recruiting large numbers of junior staff and motivating them with the prospect of becoming a partner, even though in practice only a few of them can ever make it.

他们的业务形式在某种程度上就是建立在招收大量新员工然后用成为合作人的目标激励他们努力工作，虽然实际上只有极少数人能够做到。

In other types of business, the evidence suggests that it may work at first, if a firm needs to cut away dead wood.

但在其他行业中，有证据显示这个方法在公司想要除去公司的赘余部分时还是能管用一段时间的。

But the benefit can disappear and turn into a cost if the ranking and yanking is done repeatedly, says Denise Rousseau of Carnegie Mellon University.

但是如果重复进行下去，就会由使公司收益变为带来损失。卡耐基梅隆大学的Denise Rousseau如此说道。

You can quickly end up with the people in the bottom quartile being average performers rather than poor performers, she notes.

很快，处在评估表底部的人就会是一般员工而非业务糟糕者她解释道，

There is nothing wrong with being average in an above-average workforce.

在一群极其优秀的员工中成为普通一员可没什么不对的。

A lot of good work is done by average people.

众多的优秀工作都是由普通人做成的。

If a large proportion of the workforce doubt the fairness of the grading system, and fear being among an arbitrarily imposed quota of underperformers, many may try to jump before they are pushed:

如果员工中较大一部分人怀疑评价体系的公正性，并且担心被随机地划分为不合格员工，其中不少就会尝试在被开除之前跳槽：

staff turnover may thus be higher than is desirable.

人员流动程度就会比期望的更大。

Worse, employees may look for ways to game the system, as happened at Enron, where workers conspired to inflate their results to secure their bonuses or escape the axe.

更糟的是，雇员会想法设法利用体系的规则，正如安然事件中发生的那样，员工们串通起来夸大自己的成果来保证自己的奖励或是避免被开除。

That is not the sort of teamwork and collaboration that is wanted.

这可不是我们想要的那种团结合作。