Meritline

The context

Every company that rolled out objective-based reviews lived the same thing: each manager put their people above average, the sum of the bonuses exceeded the available pool, and someone had to cut by hand in a four-hour meeting with a spreadsheet on the projector. The problem isn't that managers lie: it's that they review one person at a time, without seeing the rest and without knowing the money is finite. The individual rating is an opinion; the bonus is an allocation. They're two different operations and almost no system separates them.

What the system does

• Calibration is a real screen, not a report: four columns with the bands, people as cards, and moving someone between columns changes the bonus, the pool's remainder and the area's distribution in the same instant
• The approved pool is always in view and can go red. The system doesn't stop you from going over: it stops you from not noticing, which is what a hard cap never achieves
• What the manager proposed and what ended up happening are both kept, in two columns. It's what lets you answer «my manager rated me outstanding, why am I paid like solid?» with a fact instead of an improvised explanation
• An objective nobody hit is flagged as a badly set objective, not as nine weak reviews. And a safety objective with a target of zero isn't flagged even if it fails: the bar isn't lowered because it's hard to clear
• Each reviewer's bias before the meeting and not after: who proposed three outstandings out of four and who closed their reviews without writing a line. It's the difference between calibrating in an hour and calibrating in four
• The bonus arithmetic laid open in three factors —salary, attainment capped at 100% and band multiplier— because this number gets explained face to face, and any formula a manager can't rebuild on a napkin ends up being «the system says so»
• Spot recognition exists, is granted on the moment and comes out of a separate pool, but it doesn't weigh on the band: if it did, calibration would go back to being an argument about anecdotes
• And permissions don't hide buttons: they change which rows exist. With an area manager's role the salary column isn't disabled, it isn't there