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In Japan, it’s said that 20% of a company’s employees are high performers, 60% are average, and 20% are near worthless. This 2-6-2 paradigm is a force of nature; it doesn’t matter if we are talking about the most elite company in Japan or the most insignificant one.
So explains Musashi Suga, business management consultant and representative of Suga Office in Yokohama. Suga specializes in human resource system design and came up with this ratio after analyzing in-depth, organizational changes in business management in the Japanese corporate workplace.
Any given company employs people with the best qualities, hoping to refine them into better and better employees as the years go on. According to Suga, although it may initially appear that this is happening, the 2-6-2 ratio has actually taken hold by the fifth year in the office.
Why does the level of performance of employees fall into this distinction instead of converging over time?
In short, it’s the hierarchical structure of the company that naturally yields this ratio. Most companies are eager to build a refined workforce and management knows that a uniform level of ability must be achieved for this to happen. Yet in any organized group of people, there are naturally 20% who rise to the top and 20% who fall to the bottom.
Most companies offer educational training programs for their workers and acquire outstanding workers from outside the company, but if this was all it took to bring everyone to the same skill level, then personnel management strategy would be a simple thing.
This 2-6-2 ratio represents a great inconvenience for companies that wish to raise a strong and competent workforce. Yet if management wishes to defy this ratio, it will take restructuring of the company itself, including a change in the power structure of the company accompanied by a change in the group dynamics of the company. In other words, a revamp of the whole hierarchical system.
In order to give life to an efficient work force the well-being of each and every company worker must be taken into consideration. Then the company will do well in their achievements.
Source: Kinisoku
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13 Comments
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paulinusa
So does this ratio also apply to management or are they 100% high performers.
gaijintraveller
I wonder what the rates are for politicians?
Frungy
This article is so full of holes it is simply ridiculous:
Firstly, almost all Japanese companies use interviews by unskilled, untrained interviewers as their selection method. This is simply the most unreliable method available, and the fact that their employee profile resembles a bell-curve (2-6-2) is a reflection of the random sampling of employees they have. The contention that, "Any given company employs people with the best qualities" is simply wishful thinking. Right at the outset Mr. Musashi's theory shows serious holes.
Secondly, there is no culture of formal performance appraisal in Japanese companies, so I am extremely dubious about where Mr. Musashi obtained his data from. I suspect it was the infamous Japanese research questionnaire. One look at the categories (high, average, worthless) reveals the problem with Mr. Musashi's research methods, as these are highly subjective, relative criteria. If one took a race then the first 3 runners would be high performers, the people who came in after that average, and the last couple of people would be low performers. The lack of objective assessment criteria means that if even the slowest runner beat the world record time for the race they would still be described like this within the group.I could go on ripping this piece of fluff apart, but it is so fatally flawed that it simply isn't worth the time. Needless to say, if this is an indication of the state of HR "expertise" in Japan then it is no wonder that the Japanese economy is in the toilet.
oikawa
It just sounds like Pareto's Law to me, and it's pretty commonsensical when you think about it. This Masashi Suga guy didn't invent it and as usual there's nothing specifically "Japanese" about tit. It applies to lots of things in life, but specifically to business things like,
Wikipedia
Frungy
More like normal distribution or the bell curve. Pareto's law is a little different.
japan_cynic
This is just drivel. Yeah, if you define "high performance" to be about the top 20%, then about 20% of people fall into that category. 20% of them will be in the top 20% height-wise, too :-)
oikawa
Frungy
Pareto's Law is just normal distribution observed in nature, as he says in the first paragraph here, "it's a force of nature". What this guy is describing is just how Pareto's Law is applied in business situations.
Frungy
Nope, Pareto's principle has to do with cause and effect. Normally the pattern is that 20% of X causes 80% of Y. That people who don't understand the Pareto principle incorrectly apply it to population characteristics is not my fault, but actually Pareto was talking about cause and effect, not population descriptors.
Normal distribution, on the other hand, deals with the normal distribution of characteristics in a sample, which is what we're looking at here.
cubic
It'd be good if this was a generally used term. e.g. "why is that floater there?", "who left that floater in my department?", etc. Toilet humour at it's finest.
Yubaru
Japanese companies don't hire for need they hire people that can fit into the culture of the specific business that they are in and unless they are hiring for a specific type of position or job will attempt to train their new employee to whatever job that they see fit.
A lot depends upon the college they graduated from and what impression they make during the interview process.
I worked in a company where there were guys with law degrees from Todai working as sales representatives. They were very adept at writing great reports but their people skills for sales left much to be desired. But because they graduated from Todai the management thought they were kings.
Frungy
I've seen this first-hand. I remember one of my colleagues pointing out a co-worker and telling me, "He graduated from Todai!"... as if this is all I needed to know about the person, despite the fact that he must have graduated about 20 years ago. It's sad, pathetic and insulting that someone's entire life and career can be summed up by where they studied when they were a young adult... and a clear indication that they've done nothing note-worthy since then.
cwhite
The top 20% will always be the top 20% as you have defined them to be so. The bottom 20% will also always be the bottom 20% which leaves 60% in the middle. What they should be doing is showing us hard statistics about things that are quantifiable. They might as well be talking about how smart dogs are 20-60-20