| I'm eight years into management across two different sized companies. Both have ultimately had entirely subjective systems. I'm currently a director of a twenty person office. My current teams are supposed to have stack ranked individuals, so I simply give everyone the exact average. I also give everyone the same objectives: improve performance with technical debt repayment, use retros to determine working agreements and adhere to them, adhere to a WIP limit and then help any other team areas when there are bottlenecks, do weekly research to keep your skills sharp, self organize your team to best meet the business goals, help anyone with their job when asked or offer a time when you next are free, and if you have no work ask your team for something to do. These are pretty easy to meet, so people usually do well on them. Ultimately compensation is tied to the whole product, not the employee, since we all split any money evenly. I find this works exceptionally well at ensuring the ultimate goal is team performance, not individual performance. Team members not pulling their weight are identified and asked to find a new job or improve. The ones that don't are given low ratings and let go. In all it allows us to have a very stable team of high performers. Our average tenure is over seven years. No one has any incentive at all to "beat" everyone else. I've found the teams that employ such tactics never have long lasting talent anyway, just a string of "heroes" who burn out after a few years. Also I flush this out with a regular "salary review" where I try to ensure everyone is paid fair market rate for their job. This happens maybe every 18 months or so for new grads, and less frequently as people get closer to salary ceilings for our location. |