Performance Rating Calibration

A performance rating is supposed to describe the work. Often it describes the manager.

On the figures this ships with, two managers rating in the same company in the same round are 1.84 points apart on a five-point scale — nearly forty per cent of the whole scale. At that size, somebody’s rating depends more on who they report to than on what they did, and every decision made downstream of it inherits that: pay, promotion, who gets developed, who gets managed out.

The tool puts each manager’s distribution beside the others, with the gap from the overall average on every row. That is the whole product: not a score, a comparison.

It holds back managers with too few reports entirely — not greyed out, not shown with a caveat. A distribution from four people is noise, and putting a name beside it turns a conversation about the process into one about a person, usually the wrong person. You set the threshold, and the page says what you are lowering if you lower it.

It is careful about what a spread means. One manager may genuinely have a stronger team, and forcing every distribution to match is how a ranking quota gets introduced by accident — which does more damage than the problem it was meant to fix. What a spread tells you is that the question is worth asking, with the actual work in front of the people who rated it, before the next round rather than after this one.

Counts only. No names of the people being rated, nothing uploaded, nothing leaves your browser.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Calibration drifts, and it drifts quietly — two rounds side by side is how you see it.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.