Tell your HR department not to evaluate employees by ranking them: The forced distribution model (FDM) first became infamous thanks to General Electric in the 1980s, when the late Jack Welch gained infamy for firing the lowest-performing 10% of employees each year, according to Success Dart. Welch — who was chairman and CEO of General Electric for two decades — used FDM to rank employees based on predetermined parameters quantifying their performance over a period of time. This model grew into a standard appraisal system in many companies worldwide, but its efficacy has been called into question over the past few years.

Why is FDM causing problems? The model can often prove disastrous for a company’s culture or morale, writes Sarah O’Connor in the Financial Times. One of the model’s greatest flaws, she argues, is that it conflates an employee’s absolute performance with their relative performance against their peers. While an employee in a strong team might be meeting all their objectives, they might still be labeled as being an underperformer, especially if they’re a newcomer who’s learning the ropes. Managers also struggle to equitably rank employees playing very different roles in the company structure.

Using FDM for evaluation translated into years of what many employees complained is a toxic work culture at some companies including Microsoft, with good performers avoiding working together for fear of suffering in the rankings and all employees quietly sabotaging their colleagues, according to Vanity Fair. These practices transformed a lean competitive firm led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent into a bureaucracy-laden firm, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.

Governments are also shifting away from this ranking system: The UK looked into FDM for civil servants and found that “a lot of the people in the bottom 10% were not underperforming,” a researcher at the Institute of Government think-tank told the FT. Since then, the UK’s senior civil service scrapped forced distribution in 2019, following Microsoft’s 2013 lead.