Change Management Plan - Research Paper Example

However, this leadership position was short-lived since towards the end of the 20th century, a company called Google emerged and gave Yahoo tough competition for its share in the Silicon Valley, especially after the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 (The Guardian, 2008). Google soon gained an upper hand over Yahoo through its effective policies and talented personnel and Yahoo has not been able to gain its initial top ranking to date. The HR policy that this report proposes to change is that of ‘stack ranking’ or ‘Quarterly Performance Review’.

The employee appraisal process was introduced by CEO Marissa Mayer in late 2013, and required that managers rate their employees on the basis of meeting their goals from a scale of 1 to 5. This system is an adaptation of GE’s forced ranking system (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006) and here too some employees are forced to fall into the lowest category, even if they did not miss any goals. Since the lowest 5% percent employees have to suffer adverse consequences, including firing, this system seems unfair to many and raises questions about Mayer’s policies.

According to Forbes (2013), more than 600 employees were fired because they had gotten low scores in two quarters of appraisals, which does not necessarily mean that they were poor performers, only that there were others (possibly) better than them. The forced ranking system was adopted because of its claimed benefits of eliminating inflated ratings and proving as a check and balance system (Grote, 2005), but for Yahoo it appears to be more troublesome than beneficial. Owing to the adverse effects that Mayer’s QPR is having on employee morale and motivation, it is proposed that the forced ranking system should be discontinued and the performance appraisal process should be modified in order to make it employee friendly.

The ranking scale of meeting goals (from ‘misses’ to ‘exceeds’) should