Employee Engagement by discontinuing the bell curve method of appraisal

The most preferred method of performance appraisal has been the bell curve where it is believed that most of the employees are average performers and very few employees are above and below the average performance level. During this process many high performers miss the chance of getting into the top rank in-spite of their excellent performance level since there is no space left for them to get into the top 5 percent. Hence it disengages them leading to attrition of the top performers. Not only this, in order to get into the top 5 % top performers list, lot of unwanted internal competition, office politics crops up. Even this discourages the employees to share resources and information with the peers. This leads to huge level of disengagement among the employees leading to attrition.

Looking at this scenario, many leading employers such Google, KPMG, Accenture, Twitter, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Infosys, Ola Cabs have stopped the usage of bell curve method of appraisal and started following the absolute rating of employees.

On the other hand, there are still some companies such as Tech Mahindra, Fortis Healthcare who are following this method of bell curve of rating since they believe that bell curve constantly raises the performance level of the employees. Some of them have tweaked the model by raising the cap of 5 percent of top performers to 6.5 percent so that more top performers are included in the merit list.