Reverse Merit

pimento

There are four in our department and one of us is going to be made redundant. Our boss says that the person who goes will be decided by 'reverse merit'.
Is this a legitimate way of doing it? Are there any legal rules that say how an employer must decide which person will go?

Thanks for any help.

pimento

Nobody?

I must ask really difficult questions because my threads never seem to get any replies.

liney

Well when there is a decrease in work so that a role needs to be made redundant, the people who stay do so on merit. I don't really know what you are getting at to be honest - the person who is the least effective/skilled/has poorest attendance/disciplanary record, should be the one that is made redundant. This should be done by comparing the 4 persons against each other and keeping the 3 who are best for the business. A redundancy matrix will be used which is basically a score sheet developed by the company with different catagories, some holding more importance than others.

The term "reverse merit" is an interesting choice of phrase, but perhaps he didn't know how to say "the one we value the least" will be going?

Ulimately you can request to see the copies of the matrix anonomised if you feel you have been scored unfairly.

Pete111

This may be because Reverse Merit is a rather Mgt speaky phrase and not widely used (yet)... In this case it basically it means the worst performer is out.

This is perfectly legal but Mgt should be prepared to objectively justify their decision as how to they identified the worst performer. Do you use performance appraisal or have sales targets etc? These would normally be part of the assessment if so. Other things like absence stats + disciplinary issues are commonly used too.

...On the other hand they could just decide on the person they like the least and then build the criteria around that to ensure they are the odd one out - that happens a lot too!

pimento

I suppose what I want to know is how do they quantify it?

We've been told that attendance and sick leave will not be a factor, and none of us have had a job appraisal in the last four years, so what criteria can they possibly use to work out who is the worst perfomer?

pimento

Liney, there has been no reduction in workload. Basically, one of our postions has been made a supervisor and rather than promote one of us the job was advertised. We all applied, but none of us was sucessfull meaning that there are now five bums for four seats.

Pete111

You should put the criteria question to Mgt. They shoudl be consulting with you re the redundancy also so the consultation meetings will give you an opportunity to ask this. It's a fair question to ask.

If you all agree to ask the question then noone is potentially singled out as a troublemaker

pimento

Thanks.
We have a meeting with HR tomorrow and this question is one that we are going to ask.

liney

Do you have Key Performance Indicators? These could be used, in absence of an appraisal system.

Zazen999

I would be asking how they can justify 'reverse merit' when you yourselves don't know what 'merit' is?

If you've not had appraisals in 4 years then does the 'reverse merit' just depend on their 'perception' or on anything concrete to do with the business?

pimento

Everyone in our company has a performance management appraisal thing done annually, but our supervisor (who is leaving on July 24) thinks it's all rubbish (quote) so hasn't done it since he has been working here.
There is nothing measurable regarding the job we do except our job ticket system which is used extensively by two of us and hardly at all by the other two. This system has a timeslip add-on which we are supposed to use for every job we do, but this is not enforced so half of the people doing our job worldwide do not use it.