Earlier Bell Curve was a better option for performance management of the employees, but now with the evolving corporate worlds many organizations have started evaluating whether bell curves are a good method of performance management.
FREMONT, CA: The most significant challenge faced by most of the companies is to assess performance accurately and implement an effective system for employee performance appraisals. In the 1980s, Bell curves were rose initially.
Here are some reasons to describe why bell curves may no longer be relevant for rating employee performance:
Do Not Work with Collaborative Teams
Earlier regular workdays consist of the 9-to-5 office regime, but now it’s not the same. As business practices are continuously advancing, and with that, performance management methods must keep up to be more productive. All the emerging trend of collaborative employee approaches reverses the efficiency of the bell curve performance ranking system.
Performance appraisals should be conducted on an employee expectation inclusively, not on the group distribution scale that bell curves need.
Bell Curves Produce Inaccurate and Unfair Assessments
Bell curve cannot measure the performance accurately when the performance goal of the teams increases. The bell curve forces workers to rank low on the scale, even though they have exceeded expectations.
After some time, worker performance appraisals can lead to higher probationary periods or increased turnover rates.
More money and effort might be spent on training new workers rather than working on individual performance within the team. In this case, the use of a bell curve in performance management can be vastly inaccurate.
Organizations that have adopted the bell curve method in the past have looked at the bottom 5-10 percent of ranked employees as disposable, instead of focusing on improvement within teams.
Bell Curves Depreciate Employee Morale
Forced company ratings for employees weaken the top performer’s value while inflating the value of middle performers. The bell curve rating system destroys worker morale by force grouping top and low performers regardless of their actual performance. Employees who fall in the middle of the curve make up more than 80 percent of the team population, forcing the budget management to focus on mid-value employees. It is better to replace a faulty employee performance system with a 360 feedback appraisal system that ranks an employee’s performance based on individual work, not against the work of their co-workers.
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