Forums

hi,

I am running a small technical support company which deals in sales and service. can anyone tell me how can i rank my employees?

TomW's picture
Training Badge

That depends. What do you want to rank them on? Height? Hair color?

What's most important to your business unit and what measures or proxies do you want to use?

HMac's picture

tree123:

Don't rank people unless you know what you're going to DO as a result of ranking them. Otherwise it's an academic, time-wasting (and possibly destructive) exercise.

Once you decide on the criteria, keep the number of ranks to two or three (eg, Pass/Fail; Above Level/At Level/Below Level).

Anything more than three ranks makes actionability really hard (OK, so that's not a real word).

-Hugh

stephenbooth_uk's picture

BLUF: Aim for objective (where possible), measurable and time based goals. Listen to the MT goals [url=http://www.manager-tools.com/2007/12/how-to-set-annual-goals-part-1-of-3....

Where I work we are all given goals at the start of the review period then at the end ranked on each goal on a scale of 1 to 5. Your overall score is the average of your goal scores.

1 is completely failed and basically being managed towards being fired
2 is failed but not so bad they can sack you, probably going to lose pay
3 is met the goal
4 is met the goal and exceeded it, slight chance of a payrise
5 is exceeded the goal by a large margin, chance of a payrise

The issues are mostly around things like poor definition of goals (not SMART at all) by managers (often 'failed', 'met' and 'exceeded' are entirely subjective and a matter of opinion) and that team salary budgets are fixed so for one person to get a payrise someone else must lose an equivalent amount of pay.

The goals you use should be relevant to your business and the roles people are in, should be something that can be objectively measured (and the measure available to the person subject to the goal), something that is reasonably within the person's control and clearly stated. Exactly what those goals are will require an understanding of your business and the roles, possible examples might be:

* For a field service engineer: "Average of N site visits per week for each week (adjusted for holidays and other absence) between date goal set and next review. Reviewed monthly on first working day of each month."
* For a phone/email support person: "Average of N calls resolved and closed per week (adjusted for holidays and other absence) between date goal set and next review. Reviewed monthly on first working day of each month."

The aim is objectively measurable (someone either does or does not do a certain number of calls a week) and time based (there's a specific start and end and there's a review cycle, I am making the assumption that in an actual goal you would specify the date of the current review where the goal is set and the date of the next review).

There's a 3 part cast (first part [url=http://www.manager-tools.com/2007/12/how-to-set-annual-goals-part-1-of-3...) on how to set annual goals that you might find useful.

Stephen

kaspar's picture

Jack W teaches us to make three segments:

20% top performers
70% develop
10% bottom (have to leave)

All three need different approaches.

bflynn's picture

If it helps, you're already ranking them - those employees that will keep working for you and those who won't.

Why do you want to rank them further? What are you trying to accomplish?

Brian

Jamini's picture

Well really it depends on you that on what conditions you want to rank them.
Well i want to share something to you, I knows a site which gives help about to become a good manager and have a good management. www.AskInfluentialLeaders.com try it may be this will be helpful to you.
All the best!

ashdenver's picture

Okay, seriously - can we do something about these spammers? I know they show up under a slew of different names but I wouldn't be opposed to further restricting the forums in such a way that spam is generally contained.