Yahoo's Case: Two Major Aspects Of Human Resource Management

Human resource management is a complex area of study. It involves the leadership and management of an organization’s people in a way that allows for optimization of company goals
Human resource managers need to be careful that their decisions do not lower employee moral, as it can greatly impact the future of the business. In Yahoo’s case, the two major aspects affecting its management of human resources were performance appraisals, and human resource planning. More specifically, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, used rating scales to measure job performance, and then fired hundreds of employees using that data. The result? A low employee morale, and even lower profits and web-traffic, the lifeblood of Yahoo. Marissa Mayer started her technology career at Google, called the “Geek Goddess” by Vanity Fair in 2014 and hailed as the face of Google during her tenure there. She was the 20th employee, and her early years at Google were hailed as a critical success. However, throughout her years at

Every employee is ranked, and then the bottom 5% of employees are fired. Mayer’s Q.P.R. is a forced distributions performance appraisal. I say this because it is mentioned in the New York Times article that managers were “forced to give poor rankings to a certain percentage of their team…” (Goel, 2016). Forced distribution is, as the name implies, a performance appraisal method that forces managers to categorize employees. It appears that employees are ranked from 1 to 5, and then those ranks are used to categorize the employee into various classifications, including the “bottom 5%”. This form of performance appraisal is controversial, and strongly disliked by many supervisors, as it may not form an accurate picture of the employees rated. It lowers morale, and causes competition among employees that is counterproductive to the culture of an