Microsoft Kills Its Hated Stack Rankings. Does Anyone Do Employee Reviews Right?

At the same time that Yahoo was taking heat for adopting a new system that forces managers to rank workers on a curve, Microsoft reportedly decided to back away from its own practice of so-called stack rankings.

Microsoft has been known as the ur-example of pitting employees against one another in an attempt to reward the excellent and weed out the weak, which gained widespread popularity in the 1980s after then-Chief Executive Jack Welch brought the ranking system to General Electric. The problem is workers generally aren’t thrilled about having to play Game of Thrones at the office. David Auerbach, a former Microsoft employee, recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that the practice had employees feeling helpless and “encouraged people to backstab their co-workers.”