Assignment 09
Submitted to:
Dr. Syed Ali Abdullah Mehboob
Submitted by:
Saqlain Arif (21016720-003)
Program:
MBA (3rd)
Course:
Strategic HRM
The Firmwide 360o Performance Evaluation Process at
Morgan Stanley
Summary
Morgan Stanley is an American Multinational investment management and financial service company
which helps individuals, governments and corporations to raise, manage and distribute the capital they
need to achieve their goals. Morgan Stanley also advise clients on financial transactions of mergers and
acquisitions, shares or IPO's. Like other organizations employees are the source of competitive
advantage for Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley targeted to become the customer's choice and provide
best products and professional services. But due to global change company had to find out their
strengths, weaknesses and professional development areas. One of them was the evaluation and
development of the employees. So, Morgan Stanley launched a 360⁰ degree performance evaluation
process to evaluate the individual and team performance. The objective of performance evaluation was
to provide performance feedback to an employee and this feedback would serve as foundation of
development of plans that help organization to achieve goals and also would help in employee
development. The process was implemented after multi-year efforts of task force of Morgan Stanley and
process was implemented under the direction of Chief Development Officer (CDO) Tom DeLong. The
360⁰ feedback was collected from superiors, colleagues, subordinates and interested clients. The
employees identified the people whom they regularly interacted and can provide substantial feedback.
This list was called Evaluation Request Form (ERF). This was discussed with evaluation director and
evaluatee's supervisor or manager. Then ERF was submitted to the office of development and collected
after complete evaluation then development officer makes 10-20 pages document called" Year-end datapacket or "The book". Then this data was interpreted by evaluation director. The key challenge for
system designers was to identify the evaluation criteria because Morgan Stanley comprised many
businesses so there were complexities to identify evaluation criteria but at the end four categories were
short listed, 1) Market/Professional Skills, 2) Management and Leadership, 3) Commercial Orientation,
4) Teamwork/ One Form Contribution. The evaluators write down the strength and weaknesses of
professionals in above listed categories. The investment bank division also contained the numeric scale
ranged from 1 (unsatisfactory) to 5 (outstanding performance). Although process is time consuming but
helpful in assessing the performance of employees. They discovered some significant flaws in the new
evaluation procedure after it was implemented at Morgan Stanley. Employees are reluctant to disclose
their coworkers' flaws. They do not want to expose difficulties and issues to other workers. They do not
want to be in charge of dismissing anybody. Another issue is that the evaluators had no instruction on
how to offer feedback. They had no idea how to convey negative information. Another issue is that the
method uses numerical scales, which are meant to make comparisons between different people easier.
One person once received 4.7, while another received only 4.65. The issue is whether there is a
significant distinction between these two values. These issues remain continue at debating table and
company each year revamp the system and with passage of time commitment to the concept was grown.