Why Evaluations Must be Consistent

When I give talks and write about conducting reductions in force, I emphasize that current evaluations of an employee's performance (assuming performance is a factor in the layoff decision) must be consistent with the employee's past evaluations. No doubt, even good employees are laid off in a RIF but when the reason for the RIF evaluation is inconsistent with the prior evaluations, the employee has a much easier time in showing the RIF selection is pretextual.

An age discrimination decision involving the former Boeing commercial aircraft assembly plant in Kansas provides an example of the problem. Boeing sold the commercial manufacturing plant to a company that became known as Spirit Aerosystems. Spirit didn't have its own employees and didn't want to hire wholesale the existing crop of Boeing employees so it relied upon performance evaluations by Boeing managers. One of the employees ("Woods") who wasn't hired by Spirit sued Boeing and Spirit.

In his last annual performance evaluation before the sale, Woods received "met all expectations" ratings in all categories. The supervisor noted there had been few errors in Wood's work areas and that he had "performed well." In comparison to the others within Woods' group, his rating was the same as two workers, but not as good as two other workers.

Before Spirit took over, it asked the Boeing managers to review the employees and make recommendations regarding who should be hired. Woods was not hired but three employees in his job classification were (this is why it is significant that Woods rating was the same as two others workers, one of whom was hired by Spirit). This time, Woods' performance was described as "limited skills/low quality/ low productivity/marginal teaming abilities." Explaining this, the manager said that Woods didn't know how to use the software as well as the others and that he rated Woods quality as low because of Woods' failure to detect several errors in products he had checked. Of course, Woods was the oldest of the three employees (Woods included) who had scored "met all expectations" on the annual evaluation and Spirit hired the youngest of these three.

This was a close case. Whether or the decision is correct, the reason the court of appeals held a trial was necessary was because of the inconsistencies between the ratings on the annual evaluation and the evaluation prepared for Spirit.

And, to echo what I said in a prior post, employers need to realize, whatever is said by the ill-informed news media, that Gross v. FBL Financial doesn't make it easier to discriminate against older workers.