Satya Nadella overhauled Microsoft’s hypercompetitive ‘stack rankings’ to reward collaboration between employees. Here’s how performance reviews work now, according to the HR chief

• Microsoft’s culture has drastically changed over the past six years.
• The performance-review system underwent a change in 2013, which Kathleen Hogan, the chief people officer of Microsoft, addressed in an interview with Business Insider.
• Performance reviews at the tech giant now emphasize three factors: individual impact, how you contribute to other people’s success, and how you leverage other people’s work.

Instead of comparing employees against each other, Microsoft managers evaluate how workers contribute to the team.

This, Microsoft Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan said, is the big change that came in 2013, when it quashed its “stack-ranking” system.

In October, Microsoft reported $37.2 billion in revenue for its first fiscal quarter, beating Wall Street’s expectations. And, thanks largely to the transition to remote work during the pandemic, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported, the Microsoft Teams chat app reached 115 million daily active users in October. That’s up from 75 million in April.