I view it as essential, however because it will give you even more insight into how your team is performing. Recording a discipline for each employee is optional. Hero’s doing across our criteria in comparison to Heros?” E – Discipline With this, we can answer questions such as “How are Sr. D – TitleĮntering a title for each team member under review enables us to gain further insight into performance of the team. Column B contains a list of your employees, or the members of the team you’re going to be reviewing. Ok, now we’re getting to some data entry. There’s probably a better or more efficient way to calculate this, but I couldn’t figure one out so I did it the hard way by manually copying and pasting the calculation across all of the various criteria columns. Where you see a cell letter or number prefaced with a dollar sign ($), that’s used to harden the reference so that as we iterate through the various cells to perform the calculation, we don’t increment that cell reference. Just understand that the letters and numbers refer to cell locations in the worksheet. If you’re new to Excel, this will probably look like gibberish.

The weighted scores and ranking are calculated by multiplying the score entered by the weight for this criteria divided by the maximum possible weight (10 in my example.) The function for the weighted score is as follows: The weights recorded in this section are used to populate a section of the results summary. Is punctuality as important as follow-through or proactivity? I won’t debate these here but I will argue that they are of differing levels of importance so any tool used to record your teams’ performance should give you the ability to reflect this. Let’s face it, not every attribute is going to be of equal importance. I am a huge proponent of incorporating a method of expressing weights to each of the criteria upon which you will rank your staff. To make things easier to communicate, I’ve enabled a two tiered categorization leveraging the ‘merge and center’ feature of Excel to consolidate the second tier of criteria under the first. This just makes communicating the results easier. For our implementation, we’re going to start with a two-tiered categorization of success criteria. There is no point in attempting to apply a ranking when your team has no idea about what you consider critical success criteria. If this has not been communicated properly, you should exit this article here and get that done ASAP. The following section of this article will explain the various components and offer suggestions for implementing your own ranking system.Įxcel Based Stack Ranking Tool Core components A – Success CriteriaĮvery job has a success profile or a set of criterion upon which success will be judged. I’ve chosen Microsoft Excel as the system I’ll use, but there are many systems available that will work.īelow, I have included an image with various highlighted sections. Implementing a Ranking SystemĪny ranking system should have a core set of components that will enable you to record the scores of your team members as they relate to criteria or attributes. This will be especially helpful when communicating results to employees as well as superiors. This means having some good reference material about what each team member’s job description or role entails. One key to ensuring that you are getting an accurate representation of your team and the rank each member assumes is by including the critical data elements by which you will evaluate them. Nevertheless, the stack ranking system, when used effectively can provide great insight into the performance of your team and can highlight important focus areas for enablement and development. And I must admit the arguments against are valid. Some have argued that there are many problems with the stack ranking system.

The issue that many managers face when it comes to stack ranking is that even if you have a solid team of super hero performers, someone will be on the bottom of the list. Especially when you consider the fact that many companies use this tool as a way to identify and carry out targeted reductions in force. Stack Ranking the members of your team can be a loathsome task.

Unlike a standard performance rating, a ranking implies that no two employees should have the same assigned rank and that when you’re finished, someone will be number one and someone will be on the bottom of the pile. Stack Ranking as the name implies is the process of stacking things or people up and applying a 1 to n rating to each.

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