Tikkok advises managers to adjust the low -performance employees, even if this could lead to internal conflicts.
The founder of the parent company bytedance once said that the attempt to be “nice” when assessing employees was not moral.
The Tikok employees are preparing for their six -month performance assessments this month.
Tech CEOs are located in their extremely hard “No more Mr. Nice Guy” era. At Tiktok and its owner Bytedance, the idea of performing performance over “nicity” has long been part of the company’s DNA.
The founder of bytedance, Zhang Yiming, once said that “people who always try to be nice are not really moral”. This emerges from corporate documents. He spoke about the performance assessments of the employees and said that the attempt to make everyone happy by rating bad and good performances equal to Tikok’s best employees.
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Zhang left the company in 2021, but its sentence on nicity remains in updated guidelines for managers, as Business Insider (BI) has learned.
Tikok did not respond to a statement at the request.
TIIKTOK follows this strict evaluation system
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The company determines quotas how many employees can receive a high or low score in each cycle. Tikok shows team leaders to avoid all employees in the middle, even if they instinctively “want to avoid conflicts”, as can be seen from the documents viewed by BI.
In its reviews, the company uses eight different ratings that “F” for “failed”; So “failed” to “O” for “outsanding”, that is, “excellent”. In a department, managers had to limit the three highest ratings to no more than five percent of the team members and award the four best ratings to ten percent or fewer employees.
TIIKTOK’s employees are preparing for the performance assessment at the middle of the year this month. These checks can be stressful for employees. In March Tikkok gave a number of e-commerce employees bad grades. Some of them offered the choice between a performance improvement plan (PIP) or a severance payment. A similar procedure was carried out at other teams a year earlier.
Increase in performance in the tech area
The TIIKKOK and bytedance approach reflects a broader advance in Silicon Valley to better identify the best and the worst employees. Microsoft changed his guidelines in April to help managers dealing with low -performance employees. Meta made it a priority in May to classify more employees than poor performance. The approach of bytedance also reflects the culture of high expectations and long working hours, which are characteristic of the Chinese tech scene in which the company was founded.
“It is generally known that Chinese companies are quite aggressive when it comes to labeling low -performance employees and basically asking them to leave the company,” said Rui Ma. He is the founder of the media and consulting company Techbuzz China.
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Even if Big Tech’s management principles may seem hard, direct feedback is a decisive part of good management, says Deborah Grayson Riegel. She is an executive coachin that writes about the communication of managers.
“We often find that someone who wants to be liked does not give direct feedback,” explains Riegel. “Higher top performers pay the price for this because they then have to manage the lower top performers who do not want to be there or shouldn’t be there, and that also pulls them down.”
Strict reviews also have disadvantages
Current and former Tikok employees said that the evaluation curve can appear arbitrary.
“More and more managers were urged to evaluate people on the extremes,” said a Tikok manager who left the company last year in an interview with BI. “Either they are exceptional and do their job really well, or they do their job really bad and get these low grades that they ultimately push them out of the company.”
The company asks the managers to take into account the self -assessment of each employee and the feedback from colleagues. The department heads could later adjust the ratings to reach the distribution goals, an employee said. The points distributions are determined on the basis of business priorities, although the managers are instructed not to share these details with the reports in order to avoid the appearance of a “forced distribution”, as BI previously reported.
This evaluation curve can lead to a certain anti-competitiveness among the team members, warns a TikTok employee.
“It is a very internal competition,” said a former employee. “In most cases, you cannot really operate a project together and demand joint results.”
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