Truth and Consequences: Rating & Ranking Your Boss
From Throwingsheep
If Generation Virtual can be defined by any single behavioral trait, it’s an obsession with rating and ranking. Young people on social networking sites feverishly rate and rank their favorite songs, movies, TV shows, photos, comic books, celebrities, you name it. And they even rate and rank their teachers.
This cultural reflex among GenVers has already has produced powerful consequences for consumer markets. Many products –songs, DVDs, books, movies, hotels -- are now routinely rated, reviewed and ranked by consumers.
The next phase of this Web 2.0 phenomenon will occur in organizations. As GenVers move into the workforce, they will be rating their bosses just as they are rating their teachers today. Life in Gen V is instantaneous mass democracy, constantly self-updating, rendering verdicts on just about everything.
If the experience with teacher/professor rating websites is any measure, as GenVers start working into companies there is bound to be tension between established corporate cultures and Web 2.0 social reflexes. In most corporations and government bureaucracies, rating and ranking (known as “evaluations”) are a top-down process. Subordinates don’t rate and rank their superiors.
But this Web 2.0 e-ruption is coming whether managers like it or not. It’s therefore important that managers understand its underlying dynamics now.
Let’s look at what happed with RateMyProfessors.com. Launched in 1999, the site today is the most heavily trafficked college website -- boasting more than 7 million users who have generated ratings of roughly 1 million professors teaching at some 6,000 collegiate institutions in Anglo-American countries (another site, RateMyTeacher.com, is devoted to primary and secondary schools). Professors are rated on a five-point scale according to straightforward criteria: easiness, helpfulness, clarity, and the student’s interest in the class before taking it. Also, “smiley” icons are assigned as visual ratings -- grinning brightly for high-satisfaction evaluations, frowning glumly for low scores.
RateMyProfessors was launched to introduce more market forces into the educational sector. “Students are demanding more information because they see themselves as customers who want the most value for their dollar,” says RateMyProfessors.com founder John Swapceinski.
Hard to argue with that. Unless, of course, you are a university professor. And especially if you’re an unpopular one. Professors give grades, but generally don’t like being graded – especially by their own students. In academia, careers are based on formal ranks that confer status – assistant, associate, full professor. For many professors, being assessed by non-ranking students is considered an affront to the institutionalized values on which their professional status is based.
RateMyProfessors has been threatened with a number of legal actions and is constantly the object of complaints and attacks from academic guilds and lobbies. Most of the criticism sidesteps the actual purpose of the site – to rate professions on a graded scale – and instead focuses on the negative impact on teachers’ feeling, reputations, and even psychological stability. Some academic unions argue that RateMyProfessors is a form of “cyberbullying”. In Britain, one teacher claimed to feel dehumanized when a student described her as a “disinfected cat”.
Other critics argue that sites like RateMyProfessors are trivialized by student obsession with the physical appearance of their instructors. Students assign “chili pepper” icons to professors they find “hot”. The “hotness” ranking indeed appears to be RateMyProfessors’ most popular attraction. The “hotness” factor has become so popular that RateMyProfessors now features a Top 50 for the “hottest” profs. One empirical study of the site found that students tend to like courses taught by professors that they find “hot”. Other studies of RateMyProfessors -- despite obvious questions about margin-of-error implications when only 50 or 60 students assess a teacher – give top marks to the site’s utilitarian function.
In France, a teacher-rating site called Note2be.com was denounced by France’s powerful teacher unions as an “incitement to public disorder”. France’s education minister, Xavier Ducros, agreed. He sent a strong signal that the government would not tolerate teacher ratings. “The evaluation of teachers is the exclusive domain of the Ministry of Education and the civil servants who are appointed to carry it out,” said Ducros. After a legal action launched by teacher unions, French courts shut the site down.
Corporate hierarchies are, as a rule, even less democratic than academic bureaucracies. So far, no free-wheeling RateMyBoss or RateMyCEO website has been launched. There is one site, called ImproveNow.com, that gives employees an opportunity to rate their bosses, anonymously, according to a number of questions such as “are angry words between you and your boss quickly forgotten?” But ImproveNow is not a mass thumbs-up/thumbs-down plebiscite like RateMyProfessors. It’s a highly controlled “HR” environment where bosses initiate the ratings by asking employees to log on and conduct evaluations. ImproveNow is primarily a service for managers -- with a business model based on revenues from executive training -- not a bottom-up democratic platform for employees.
Another site called Glassdoor, launched in June 2008, stands a chance of becoming the RateMyProfessors of the corporate world. Glassdoor members get access not only to reviews and rankings of CEOs and top executives, but also to insider knowledge about salary and bonus levels, and pros-and-cons of working specific companies. The site operates on a “give to get” policy. The service is free of charge, but you have to provide information about your own workplace to gain access to information about other employers. Glassdoor thus can lay off on its own members the cost of building its database. Information about corporations is crowdsourced by their own employees – or, in many cases, ex-employees.
Another corporate rating-and-ranking site is Criticat, which serves as a collaborative platform for transparent information about companies. Criticat features a box, for example, called Shout, which asks employees to answer the question: “What is one thing you would want to change if you are made the CEO of the company?”
If sites like Glassdoor and Criticat take off, it could become a nightmare for HR executives because it turns the table on employers by empowering job candidates with strategic information.
Forrester Web 2.0 analyst Jeremiah Owyang argues that the crowdsourced corporation has shifted power from top executives to employees. “The conversations that used to take place at the physical water cooler, has now shifted online, organized, and manifests as something greater,” notes Owyang. He cautions, however, that corporations will react to this power e-ruption. Job candidates, he says, will have more bargaining clout during the hiring process because they will be armed with detailed salary-and-bonus information, plus more qualitative assessments, thanks to sites like Glassdoor and Salary.com. This will put HR executives and recruiters on the spot, and they will doubtless refute the data gleaned on these sites. “Corporations will flinch,” adds Owyang, “and many will setup policies to prevent employees from posting private information outside of the firewall, although many of these internal memos will appear within hours on the very sites they seek to stop.”
Clearly the ratings and ranking culture among GenVers is about to provoke potentially difficult e-ruptions as it penetrates vertically structured and hierarchical organizations. The emergence of sites like Glassdoor is an early sign of a trend that is certain to spread. At this early stage, the best way to get a good reading on this e-ruption is to examine particular cases so we can assess how these informal social reflexes are being received inside formal bureaucratic structures. Is the ratings and ranking reflex gaining momentum in corporations and government bureaucracies? Are there interesting examples where boss-rating has been embraced and encouraged – and what are the results? Are there examples, on the contrary, where employees have been disciplined for encouraging a rating and ranking culture inside an organization? We need to learn more from concrete examples and case studies.
