Huge difference between stacked/forced ranking and performance reviews.

Stacked ranking is when employees are forced into arbitrary boxes and then the company cuts a certain category loose by termination. Managers will be will told “your team has 10 people, you MUST review and rank someone as a 1 then fire them.” The manager has little choice. Some companies offer leeway if teams are very small, but others like Amazon are cut throat because they haven’t lost massive class action lawsuits from their employees yet like GE and Microsoft did.

Amazon is being very transparent in what they are doing here. They aren’t doing performance reviews. They are cooking the books to cut an arbitrary number of people for performance issues because it sounds better than I ranked layoffs. In this case, they have just instructed managers to forced rank everyone they want laid off into the bottom tier.

Hence forced distribution.

Edit: a key component of forced distribution is that you can technically meet or exceed your company demands and still rank in the bottom tier because company policy forces someone to be there. So a team of high performers who all exceed will have an arbitrary percentage ranked as not meets or equivalent.

This really happens. Companies really get sued. Although probably not in this environment considering corpos have well and truly captured the courts.