What I demonstrated would work equally well without the year. Just remove the yyyy from the first action, and the 2016 (twice) from the second action.
Your action appears correct to me, and yet is showing “currently false”. My guess is that you have other characters in the calculation field that are not visible in the image. Try widening the display, or alternatively, post the actual actions (see How export a macro as an image without starting a new post?).
“A < B < C” (like you show in your second example) is not what you expect. It does not mean “A < B AND B < C”. “A < B” returns 0 or 1, and then it will test 0 or 1 < C, which in this case will always be true for “< 20161201”.