performance management practices-MORGAN STANLEY

 MORGAN STANLEY

Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered at Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in more than 42 countries and more than 60,000 employees, the firm's clients include corporations, governments, institutions, and individuals.Morgan Stanley ranked No. 67 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.Morgan Stanley is a financial services corporation that, through its affiliates and subsidiaries, advises, and originates, trades, manages, and distributes capital for institutions, governments, and individuals. The company operates in three business segments: Institutional Securities, Wealth Management, and Investment Management.

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

For years, Morgan Stanley employees were graded in part on a numerical scale that rated them from 1 to 5.Now, the Wall Street firm plans to change those evaluations — by taking away the numbers.Morgan Stanley told its staff that it was overhauling how employees are assessed in several ways, including by discarding the number scale in favor of lists of up to five adjectives.

The changes are the latest effort by a stalwart of corporate America to change how it evaluates employees. Some companies, like Microsoft and Morgan Stanley’s longtime rival Goldman Sachs, have made their own changes, which have also included getting rid of numerical ratings.Others, like the consulting firm Accenture, have decided to do away with the annual performance review altogether. To these companies, the ritual had proved wasteful and ineffective.

For Morgan Stanley, annual reviews are still helpful in determining how well employees do their jobs. But the current system — in which staff members were asked roughly eight questions and ranked, in addition to being questioned about “areas for development” — was in need of a change.

Evaluators will now be asked to list up to five adjectives that describe the employees. The aim is to give more direct feedback and better steer staff members toward areas of improvement.

Morgan Stanley will also put in place a dashboard that compiles all the information needed by supervisors to evaluate employees — like metrics measuring their behavior and data from risk and control functions — in one place.Other aspects of the performance evaluation process will remain unchanged, including providing “360-degree” reviews, drawn both from supervisors and colleagues.

But the timeline for reviews will change. This month, Morgan Stanley employees will meet with their supervisors for face-to-face midyear performance reviews, rather than receive written ones. In November, managers will meet with and discuss the full 360-degree reviews with their staff members before submitting them and deciding on promotions and compensation.

Employees will be evaluated not just on how much money they bring into the firm, Ms. Sullivan said, but also on a broad array of factors meant to measure their overall contributions to the firm.