The 9 box grid is typically described as an employee assessment tool.  We prefer to describe it as a visualisation tool to help managers better cultivate and manage their employees performance and personal development.

It uses a grid-based system to plot employees across 9 key data points considering employees' performance levels and potential for growth.  At VFS, we extend the concept and use both size and colour of the 'bubble' that represents each individual, to indicate a RAG status of risk or concern and an illustration of the relative 'management effort' required for this person.

*RAG - Red, Amber Green traffic light system that represents Bad, Ok, Good.

There are several anti-patterns for using such a tool and in more general, scoring employee performance.  We discuss this on our Building Competence page.  There are a couple of other specifics too:

• We suggest avoiding the use of terms such as "Star Performer".

• We lay out the grid with performance up the y axis so potential is on the x / time axis.  This feels more intuitive.

• Whilst there is likely to be some variation in everyone's performance, we suggest not trying to fit this variation to a prescribed distribution such as a Bell Curve.  The main reason for this is that at various points in time, for example after a concerted training and development period, there may be more employees performing very well against their grade / expectations and as such are ready for promotion.  Likewise, immediately following such a period, you should expect to see more employees underperforming against their grade or role expectations.  This is fine and should be allowed to be reflected in the scoring.