Following up on yesterday’s post on KPMG’s slashing of ratings, we checked with a source that gave us the lowdown on the rating system at Deloitte:
“From what I heard, all of the 4s and 5s have already been shown the door. D&T is known to suppress ratings, so I doubt that there will be a lot of 1s or even 2s this year.”
So we asked them to elaborate on “suppress ratings”:
Get the details, after the jump
Your Senior and your manager will give you a rating. Lets say that you are good and they give you a 2. They will need to justify this rating to the entire firm when they have the review meeting (I forget the exact name). Since every Senior thinks that their staff is the shit, a lot of the 2s tend to get pushed down to 3s because if everyone is performing at a higher level, then that is the average. Then, they have a limited number of 2s to fight over…2s get paid more and I think that they get some kind of performance bonus. So they have an incentive to limit the number of 2s given out every year.
Sound familiar to anyone? Discuss.
We’re smack in the middle of performance review time so email us any shady changes, adjustments, throwing people under the bus, etc. going down to tips@goingconcern.com
They’re called “Consensus Meetings.” They are essentially the functional equivalent of the pledge voting scene in Animal House, where all the frat brothers gather in the basement and boo, hiss, and throw beer at the projection screen showing pledges’ (staffs’) pictures.
@1…hahaha, funny and accurate!
Caleb – this is the same way it goes down at KPMG. Mark Goodburn once told all of advisory that there is no quota of EPs per office/practice when our practice management said the exact opposite that there were only a finite number of EPs to be given in each office. People were ready to burn him in effigy after that…
PMLs at KPMG send a rating and if your partner in your office will fight for you then your rating will stay during these performance pow wows but if you are a non-entity to your partner (and others) than you get pushed down fairly easily and quickly…so the trick is to have a higher rating going in to avoid getting pushed to an NI and possibly a PIP (cryptically defined as Performance Improvement Plan – aka reason to shit can someone for cause – which if you fight it they threaten to contest your unemployment benefits should you attempt to claim them).
The fucked up thing is people can get promoted without getting an EP so what the hell is an Exceptional Performance if it doesn’t equal promotion when compared to people at the same level. Example two Srs that are up for promotion and one is promoted but BOTH did NOT receive an EP – another Sr. who was not up for promotion gets the EP…the logic (or lack thereof) is astounding.
Every big4 is doing this. At EY we were specifically told that ratings the past few years were “inflated” and would be “right-sized” aka lowered. You could go into roundtables (aka review committee’s) with average ratings of a 4 (exceeds) or 5 (significantly exceed) and come out with a 3 (fully met) very easily. My favorite line from attending one of these review committee’s was everyone starts as a 3 and you have to giht to move them up. Feedback was essentially thrown away and a rating was assinged based on your percived worth to the firm, and practise.
At least EYs ratings are understandable. Stephen Hawking could not figure out nor explain KPMG’s 9-box rating…
@3: I can verify that. Just happened to me, exactly as described. Had all 4s and 5s, got a 3 with no explanation.
Gee, thanks Uncle Ernie! F* you, too!
I will also confirm what 3 & 5 said. I’m a sr mgr in one of the so called Advisory services and the directive from our practise head (Sam J for the NESA folks out there) was that everyone was a 3 unless they sold a million plus the previous year & exceeded their utilization goal by 20%+. Didn’t matter what they did for their clients. People first my ass…Caleb you need to do a story on this as its painfully obvious this is the big 4’s method of stealth layoffs. Taking a page out of the big law firm playbook.
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