"Low Performer" and "Underperformer" as Harmful Misnomers That Damage a Company's Reputation
Legal reasons, legal loopholes/hacks
Words matter. Misnomers need to be avoided or called out. Communication deserves accurate vocabulary; without it, there is deceit.
A few hours ago Dr. Andy Farnell published "Freedom from ThE B0llOcKS", an article that mostly deals with meaningless, misleading buzzwords, or misleading language that leads to negative outcomes, based on deliberately false assumptions. It habitually cites Stallman's rejection of terms like "AI" (in reference to LLMs, for instance) and "cloud".
Every time you say "AI", you make the whole world mumble and gaze at its shoes a little more.
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Stallman has a punk way of cutting through the epic miasma of bullshit generated by corporate American tech. You won't hear him mumble words like "AI" or "Cloud". He doesn't use those words because they are meaningless marketing terms designed to subtract clarity from conversation. It's hard not to respect, even admire those who refuse to adopt the language of the enemy.
Right now IBM has the term "low performer" and "underperformer", a requiem to a PIP. Somebody has just said that "if you are marked low performer two years in a row you go on a pip (and it may be just a formality to exit you)." Notice that comment further down, allegedly from a manager:
When people get labeled "low performer" they are likely to leave or seek alternative employment, as getting sacked for being a "low performer" makes them stigmatised and it makes finding a job harder. That's why many workers complain about this system of stack(ed) ranking(s) and there's another issue with "low performer", as people explained earlier:
The issue with the 15/70/15 stack is this: I work on an R&D team of about ten people, and at the team level, all of our projects are important. We all understand that and respect each other’s work. But recently, some projects have been tied directly to customers. As a result, the people assigned to those projects are effectively exempt from the bottom 15%. Meanwhile, those of us on projects without a direct customer tie are almost automatically at risk of falling into that category.It stops being about performance and becomes about project assignment. This isn’t new — we’ve seen it before. The last time it happened, it created significant issues, especially when customer priorities shifted or projects changed direction. That’s part of why the approach was abandoned in the past. It’s disappointing to see it being revived again.
And a useful restaurant analogy.
As a customer, I cannot trust IBM and its product, when IBM admits that 15% are "low performers". Would anyone eat in a restaurant knowing that at least 15% of the employees don't wash their hands after using the bathroom and the restaurant has a sign displaying that info.The stup1d Indian at the top is full of garbage and needs to be fired.
That's referring to the CEO because of a stigma about food safety and somewhat detracts from the otherwise OK analogy.
When companies start 'insulting' their own staff they give themselves a bad reputation. In the case of restaurants, there's always some other restaurant nearby that someone can go to. █