Another HR fail by Marissa Mayer angers Yahoo employees

YAHOO! CEO Marissa Mayer drops another HR clanger as she introduces a controversial new policy that has its employees up-in-arms.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer introduces controversial new plans for its staff. Source: AFP

YAHOO! CEO Marissa Mayer has enraged employees when it was announced the company would be forcing managers to rank employees using a controversial bell-curve model.

An article by Business Week reports [link] on the new policy and highlights the error of Yahoo's ways by harking back to the dark days of management.

The employee evaluation policy, made popular in the 1980s, is intended to boost company performance by rewarding a small percentage of top performers, encouraging a large majority in the middle to improve, and firing the lowest performers.

A typical example of a bell-curve chart often used in maths and science studies. In Yahoo's case the top performing employees would be at the peak of the curve. Those below are "encouraged" to work harder. Source: ThinkStock

However, a report by MIT observed that the model is hugely flawed and sees "constant pressure [which] demoralises employees, leading to a drop in performance."

The article goes on to say, "many people have lost faith that ranking employees works, and some research suggests that employee performance doesn't follow a bell curve at all."

This not-so-popular incentive follows the news of February this year where Yahoo stopped allowing its employee's working from home, even if they had urgent family obligations, and as Business Week highlights, "this can have a particularly bad impact on innovation, arguably the thing Yahoo most needs now".