# ranks: i think 6 separate employee ranks is all what an organization needs

in @/utopia i briefly mentioned how people can start climbing the organization ladder. but what are the individual rungs of such organizational ladder? i propose the following six ranks:

• rank 1, member: the person is simply a member but isn't contributing anything to the organization.
• rank 2, apprentice: a person interested in contributing and still learning the ropes but can help out with simple work already.
• rank 3, assistant: the person can carry out work with supervision.
• rank 4, contributor: the person can carry out work without supervision.
• rank 5, leader: the person can generate work for at least 3 contributors.
• rank 6, director: the person can generate work for at least 3 leaders.

i'm sure one can think of higher ranks but i think that's counterproductive. at such high level ranks start matter less and different forms of organization should take over instead. if an organization still wants to rank higher-ups, it should do it informally.

# what are the ranks for?

when i'm interacting with another employee, i can use the rank to estimate the weight of the other person's request. suppose i maintain a piece of software and someone reports an issue in the software. i then look at the reporter's rank. if it's from a director, then it means that fixing the bug will have a larger effect on the organization compared to a member. by making a director's life easier it means he will have more time to focus on his high impact work.

but more importantly, i'd use the ranks for determining salary. i'd get rid of the per person salary numbers and just have a fixed formula for it. it would be a function of the rank and tenure and nothing else. i want to reward tenure too to disincentivize people from job hopping.

if an organization wants to reward performance, it can do so through one time bonuses. a one time high performance stunt wouldn't result in forever increased salary.

managing pay like this would be super simple, no need to deal with secrecy or problematic stuff like wage gaps.

# how is rank determined?

this is nasty and i don't have a good solution. i suppose some committee based system would be the best. nevertheless let me try to come up with an algorithmic solution and then explore its properties.

i'd create an online feedback system where each employee can give endorsement for another employee. in a public company we would want things to be accountable so the data entered into this system would readable by everyone in the company.

for each endorsement, the endorser needs to pick one of the following two prompts to respond to:

• work: name an example of a recent, well executed work item of this person.
• leadership: name an example of this person generating meaningful work for you recently.

the endorsement must be reviewed and approved by another employee who can verify that the endorsement is truthful and is relevant to the employee's assignment. for leadership endorsement the reviewers would ensure that the individual endorsements are distinct enough.

people can send endorsements at any given moment. then each day the system takes the approved endorsements from the past year and assigns ranks according to the rules below. your rank is determined by the highest condition you meet. it's each employee's responsibility to ask others to write feedback for them. if they don't do it regularly, they will start losing their ranks automatically. yes, i'd totally allow going down in ranks too. i don't get what's so bad about that.

here are the requirements i'm imagining:

• rank 1: no requirements.
• rank 2: you need to receive a work or leadership endorsement from a rank3+.
• rank 3: you need to receive a work or leadership endorsement from a rank4+.
• rank 4: you need to receive work or leadership endorsements from 2 rank4+s.
• rank 5: you need to receive leadership endorsements from 3 rank4+s.
• rank 6: you need to receive leadership endorsements from 3 rank5+s.

the requirements for rank 5 and rank 6 are significantly different. but i think that's fine. leadership is a critical role. if someone wants the high esteem that comes from high rank, they should continuously work for it. their underlings should continuously prove that said leader is still worthy. and because all the endorsements are public, anybody can check why people consider a person so highly ranked.

when bootstrapping, assume that there's at least 3 rank4+s. all the other ranks are reachable after that. people just need to keep entering endorsements. if you have less than 3 rank4s then just keep the 3 most tenured people as rank4. eventually the system will self-correct any imbalance.

# developmental feedback

suppose alice, a rank4, wants to achieve rank5. she asks bob to give her a leadership endorsement. but bob is not entirely sure alice is actually rank5 material. bob can discuss this with alice privately and alice can work with bob to ensure alice is providing work for bob meaningfully.

while alice is working on improving her performance, bob can start entering the draft endorsement into the feedback tool. once alice's performance is adequate, bob can finalize the endorsement in the tool.

# low drama

this system doesn't allow entering negative feedback. i think that's fine. negative feedback is probably best conveyed through private channels than public ones.

but suppose you know that alice, a rank5, did a seriously bad thing and you think she doesn't deserve their current rank. in the feedback system you (or the hr department) can track down who supported her rank5 and talk to them directly. when alice is asking the endorsers the next time, they might simply not do it due to the raised concerns. you might also warn the reviewers of the endorsements about alice's problems. so even if alice finds other endorsers, chances are the endorsements will not get through the reviews. alice will lose her high rank after a year without much public drama.

# jump to top

notice how at low ranks both work and leadership endorsements are accepted. this ensures two things: even if rank5 secures only two leadership endorsements, they will downgrade only to rank4.

it works the other way too. suppose you hire a prominent ceo from another company. initially you would give this person rank 1. if they can prove themselves right away, they can very quickly jump to rank 6. so this ranking system doesn't require experienced employees to go through all the rungs individually. however if the new person doesn't really work out, you didn't lose much. you just gave him a few months of rank 1 salary after all.

# limited positions

what if the company is low on money and wants to reduce the number of rank6s? it's really easy to do so. it can simply change the requirements. e.g. for rank6 the algorithm will now require 4 leadership endorsements. then only the truly worthy rank6s remain.

# low process

i want to keep the process relatively simple, that's another reason i differentiate work and leadership endorsement. the work endorsement can be quite simple: "alice prepares the daily meals perfectly without any supervision". two people say that and alice can stay rank 4. it should take only a couple taps on people's smartphones. i'd expect most people would coast at rank 4 for most of their carrier.

for leadership endorsement the process would be more involved, i'd expect more elaboration about the work done. but that's fine, high level people should be able to deal with the extra bureaucracy.

# no self packets

initially i considered having a system where each employee writes their own achievement packet and then others just approve the packet. but i find that a bit too self-oriented. i want people to rank each other rather than themselves. after all people's impact is only real if the other people can actually see it and describe it with their own words. then the employees are incentivized to be nice so that others write nice things into the public records.

and that concludes my idea about employee ranking. i have no idea how realistic this idea actually is. it seems like a low-overhead system so i wouldn't mind working in a company that is experimenting with a system like this.

published on 2022-10-13

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