A variant of this system was tried at Ford Motor Company for a while for
its management employees, but when some older employees who didn't make the
cut sued alleging age discrimination, Ford scrapped it. The initial cut was
10%, later reduced to 5%. The company wound up paying $10.5 million to more
than 500 employees to settle the suits.

See http://www.detnews.com/2002/autosinsider/0204/23/b01-471996.htm

At 11:13 AM 1/8/2003 -0800, Duane Percox wrote:
>Paul wrote:
>
> >New ranking/performance system at HP where every year no matter how good
> >their performance is 5% of the staff will be placed in a certain ranking
> >category that basically seals that employees fate to be terminated.
>
>Ever have a class in college where you were graded on a curve :-)
>
>Relative based performance ranking has lots of merit and rewards those
>who consistently outperform the group while providing incentive/motivation
>for the bottom performers to consider other career options.
>
>BTW - I know other non-hp technology companies who operate on this principle
>but use 10% as their cut-line.

--------------------------------
Tom Brandt
Northtech Systems, Inc.
130 S. 1st Street, Suite 220
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1343
http://www.northtech.com/

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