I am considering putting together a class action lawsuit against Wells Fargo. The management and board conspired to save money, and in particular higher than average salary and severance compensation, by requiring a quota of ratings below par - Inconsistently Meets or, even worse, Does not Meet for team members who were given solidly positive ratings at mid-year (over the past 2-3 years) and then were surprised with negative feedback, inserted by middle manager's managers, with no warning or notification during the previous 6 months, that their performance was lacking or needed improved. In other words, if you were surprised by a poor rating and you suspect it was negatively influenced by the HR policies of Charlie Scharf and company, you might want to join us. I have internal documentation (power points to managers) that show the expectations of HR.... that at least 30 percent of employees should be rated below a 3 and another percentage be 1s. This was all designed to make it so bad that you quit before they have to pay you severance when they finally get around to laying you off. This, on top of decreased benefits, is being structured for one reason - bonus' for Charlie, Kleber, Bill and the rest of the cronies.... and getting rid of liabilities (tenured WF employees) without having to pay them as they push us out the door.
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I am the only person at the entire bank that does what I do. By definition, if I don't do my job then it doesn't get done. But I do do my job, and I do it well, and everything functions.
But I still rate a "needs improvement".
Doesn't make any sense. My job is a niche technical "yes it works" or "no it's broken" kind of thing. It is not physically possible to have a condidtion where "it doesn't work well enough".
So I should either be a "meets" or a "not meets". It's black and white.
These ratings are all about personality, and how much your manager likes you. Job performance often doesn't even enter the picture.
Being rated “inconsistently meets” because you aren’t what management perceives as middle of the pack performance is just mind bogglingly illogical. It is f’ing apples and oranges. The powers that be , maybe forcing this on managers, should just be honest and not present a rating like that unless the employee is actually inconsistently meeting stated goals. Sadly, they are usually more like “good job” and “thank you” all year long and then the some people getting that feedback receive a low rating , like a cold dead eel being slapped across your face at 50mph. It is honestly disgraceful.
Leak to the New York Times. Wells is already in the news for having bogus diversity interviews. The media loves throwing this company under the bus
Funny that you don't seem to grasp that most managers "like" employees that are high performing. So yes, the people I "like" get good ratings. I "like" them because they are good at their job. I don't drink beer with them or hang out after work, I'm not even in the same town so there's no a-s kissing going on, unless doing your job well = a-s kissing I guess.
Interesting to hear how different the various LOB are, assuming some of the responses are true.
Good luck OP, I also experienced the same along with the unethical attrition. I accepted the severance.
Our LOB had a town hall this week and exec leader said there is an excess of 40k employees currently to 1- get us aligned to our peers and 2- tame the efficiency ratio.
The large scale reorgs that just happened in the Ops area were “the first step in addressing this excess”. They also called out that the bloated and manual processes put in for the TCP program will be streamlined now that the part 30 closed.
It’s how the wagon wheel turns - get an issue, build a kingdom around it and load it up with manual, nonsensical processes - issue goes away and blow it up in the name of “streamlining” since there was no time to do it efficiently from the jump - wait for next issue and repeat.
I’ll take it one step further. I know of at least two lines of businesses that purposefully instituted unrealistic SLAs and QA teams for the sole purpose of decreasing performance ratings. The goal is to trim fat without providing severance OR build up poor performance ratings based upon untimely deliverables so, you can be fired for cause.
If your business line starts requiring twice as much work or the same work in half the time, I’d suggest seeking another role. Wells has too many excess team members to just lay people off at certain pay grades so, the game is to play with performance ratings which also impact your ability to find an internal position.
The quality of your work has nothing to do with your rating. The only thing that matters is if your manager "likes" you or not.
I can't begin to count the number of good employees who I've seen turned into bad employees over the years, simply because they were told that they "don't meet" or whatever the terminology of the year was.
It's a shame.
Rating are on a bell curve and the group % changes as the teams roll up to leadership. The overall enterprise wide employee ratings need to meet the % described below-
Consistently Exceeds 5%
Exceeds 15%
Meets 60%
Inconsistently meets 15%
Needs Improvement 5%
What if you are the only one who does what you do? You can't really be rated low or high based upon a comparison. Rated against expectations and projections only.
In the area where I am, goals get assigned around April, mid year is about 2 mos later, then YE numbers are assessed as of September or October. Total joke. Monitoring is via inaccurate reports via cumbersome systems. Too difficult and energy sucking to maintain accuracy. Reviews are mostly pointless, especially with management playing musical chairs, and ratings are engineered to satisfy "HR". HR is a mysterious power here, blamed a lot by ineffectual management.
Wells Fargo performance ratings are ABSOLUTELY rigged. I’m a former manager turned “product owner” which I took just to get out of the ugly situation of having my ratings changed by committee. It’s a no win sitch…
I’d quit, but I’m not sure I could find a better pay situation at this point in my career.
If it doesn't violate labor laws, good luck.
If someone goes for 6 months not knowing that their work isn't meeting expectations then it's pretty obvious they were checked out. In retail banking doing a needs assessment with EVERY customer is the expectation. So if someone isn't hitting 100% then they are inconsistently meeting expectations
Maybe in your LOB, but in my neck of the woods there's nothing about comparing directs vs each other in their goals. We've got pretty specific metrics and it's absolutely possible for a bunch of people on the team to be in the exceeds / consistently exceeds group, way more than the "preferred percentages", for sure. Maybe not everyone, but higher % than they say they are looking for. It's a joke. Do you want high performing teams or not? Does there have to be a bunch of dead weight on a team to justify high ratings for deserving employees? It makes no sense.
File the lawsuit, i was inconsistent Meet rating. After 1 month i was laid off. I was told by the manager, they have give to this rating. They cant have everyone with Rating Meets.
Leak it to the New York Times, you’ll have better luck
I do not think you have a class action material here
Good luck
Nobody accepts honest feedback anymore. They say they want it but complain when they get it. If you aren't meeting an expectation, ask why and show work to improvement. It isn't about comparing to peers. It is about having measurable stretch goals that not everyone can meet. Worry about yourself meeting the goal and ask how you can get help if struggling. People try to put to much energy and direction into the process. Not everyone is a meets. Just like grades in school. Some were only capable of a C and some always an A.
I’m not sure where the 30% is. Everything i’ve seen is 15% at Inconsistently Meets and 5% at Needs Improvement. This is widely available to all employees not just managers.
Also not sure why using 3, 2, 1 rating system still. Hasn’t been that way for long time.
But you couldn’t possibly have a team full of Consistently Exceeds. Lets take a team of 10 for example. You are supposed to measure employees against their peers. If they all are Consistently Exceeds, who are they consistently exceeding? Someone has to be meets or exceeds for them to consistently exceed someone.
Now, I certainly do not agree that x% needs to be in this bucket or that bucket. And I do understand the point you are making, but that is how this rating system is setup.
I have similar experience. Never a pressure to bump someone down, but there are reviews to make sure that if you put someone higher into the exceeds or consistently exceed there is legitimate reasoning behind why. It is with fellow team managers and director level. If some of my peers and/or boss disagree, I need to make sure my arguments are based in fact and i am persuasive to get it through. Most of the time they know who the rockstars are and will agree. Similarly we discuss if you rank below Meets to make sure it is justified.
In OPs defense, the DEI Kleber and Bill are just there to pile up money. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do either of their jobs. Woke Fargo Virtue Signaling and Sometimes Banking.
I was a victim of this unethical rating practice. This was one of many reasons that I left this toxic establishment. I hope that there is a class action filed.
I never received any pressure from the top to give people ratings below meets, but they do apply pressure so make sure you don't have "too many" people rated higher than meets. Apparently they don't like high performing teams, because if you ever did form one with nothing but superstar employees you'd never be able to give them enough justification for it to be tolerable to have high ratings for everyone.
Charlie was known for this when he left Mellon Bank- per published stories. Employees specifically complained that their management was "encouraged" to rate employees as below standard and needs improvement when before they were exceptional. The main reason at Mellon was to not payout incentives. In my opinion, you may have a good class action, especially if you could tie the two together.
A poor rating isn't really a shocker for OP given he can't resist inserting his obsession with Bill Daley and DEI into everything he says.
Yeah, good luck with that.