Bell Curve performance process is totally unfair - Anonymous employee Sage Employee Review

Thanks for your feedback. Sage has fantastic people right across the globe, they are friendly and professional and we understand the success of Sage is down to each and every one of us working towards collective goals. Regarding salaries, Sage uses market data, cost of labor and adjusted pay rates based on location to develop our salary structure. When colleagues move to a role of the same size and complexity, from a parity/fairness viewpoint, a base salary increase wouldn’t be appropriate. Our People Business Partners and Learning & Development Centre of Expertise support our managers in ensuring all colleagues performance ratings are calibrated to objectively help them with consistency, levelling and fairness. We do have guidelines for the distribution of performance ratings (which are available to all colleagues to see via the Sage Academy). We expect managers to understand these guidelines and consider these in the context of business results. Our global performance data for FY16 shows 86% of our colleagues were rated as ‘Meeting Expectations’ or above, showing us that the performance distribution curve was slightly skewed to the right. We anticipate around 15% of our colleagues may fall short of requirements, needing improvement which may be supported through a Performance Development Plan or Performance Improvement Plan to get back them on track. Continued unsatisfactory performance may result in a colleague leaving the business. This approach to managing performance is no different to the majority of established organisations with ambitions to drive performance and ensure the sustainability of their business in the future. Thanks again for your views.