This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Charles
Every performance review concludes with a “development plan” – a list of skills the employee should work on, training courses they should attend, and growth objectives they should pursue.
These development plans are usually created during the review meeting itself, based on perceived weaknesses identified through the rating process. They’re reactive rather than strategic, focused on fixing problems rather than building strengths.
Most development plans sit in HR files until the next review cycle, when managers realise they can’t remember what development activities were supposed to happen and scramble to find evidence of progress.
The best employee development I’ve seen happens through challenging work assignments, regular coaching conversations, and opportunities to learn from experienced colleagues. None of this requires formal development planning processes.
It just requires managers who pay attention to their people’s growth and create opportunities for learning in the normal course of business.
Rating Scale Ridiculousness
Performance review systems always include numerical or descriptive rating scales. “Exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” “needs improvement.” Or numbers from 1 to 5. Or percentile rankings. The assumption is that precise measurement improves management decision-making.
Here’s the problem: performance evaluation isn’t a scientific measurement. It’s a subjective judgment about complex human behaviour in constantly changing contexts.
Different managers interpret rating scales differently. What one manager considers “exceptional” performance, another might rate as “good.” What one team considers challenging circumstances, another might see as normal operating conditions.
I’ve seen identical employees receive completely different ratings from different managers in the same organisation. The rating scales created an illusion of objectivity while concealing significant bias and inconsistency in evaluation approaches.
The ratings become more important than the actual feedback, and people focus on justifying numerical scores rather than discussing performance improvement.
The Recency Bias Problem
Annual reviews suffer from massive recency bias – disproportionate focus on recent events rather than performance across the entire review period. Managers typically remember what happened in the past three months much more clearly than events from nine months ago.
This creates perverse incentives for employees to manage their performance around review timing rather than delivering consistent results throughout the year. Smart employees ensure they’re highly visible and productive in the months leading up to reviews, regardless of their performance earlier in the cycle.
I worked with a marketing team where employees regularly scheduled their biggest campaigns and most impressive projects for the final quarter, knowing that recent successes would dominate their annual evaluations.
Meanwhile, colleagues who had delivered excellent work earlier in the year but faced challenging projects during review season received lower ratings despite similar overall contributions.
Recency bias makes annual reviews fundamentally unfair and encourages gaming behaviour rather than sustained performance.
The Legal Documentation Obsession
Many organisations treat performance reviews primarily as legal documentation rather than management tools. The focus is on creating records that will protect the company in case of employment disputes rather than actually improving employee performance.
This legal orientation encourages managers to avoid honest feedback that might be difficult to defend in court. Instead of clear, specific performance discussions, managers write carefully worded evaluations that say nothing useful while checking all the procedural boxes.
I’ve seen performance reviews that described serious performance problems in such diplomatic language that employees didn’t understand they were failing. These same reviews were later used to justify termination decisions that came as complete surprises to the affected employees.
The legal protection goal and the performance improvement goal often conflict directly. Reviews that satisfy lawyers rarely satisfy employees or managers.
Calibration Meetings: Bureaucracy Gone Mad
Many organisations hold “calibration meetings” where managers get together to discuss their ratings and ensure consistency across teams. The goal is to eliminate bias and create fair evaluation standards.
In practice, these meetings often become elaborate negotiations where managers argue for their preferred ratings rather than honest assessments of employee performance.
I’ve observed calibration sessions where managers spent hours debating whether someone deserved a “3” or a “4” rating while never discussing what that person should do differently to improve their performance.
The calibration process assumes that performance can be standardised across different roles, teams, and contexts. But a high performer in one environment might struggle in another, and identical ratings can mean completely different things for different positions.
Calibration meetings consume enormous amounts of management time while adding little value to actual performance management.
The Engagement Survey Disconnect
Organisations spend millions on employee engagement surveys to understand how people feel about their work, their managers, and their development opportunities. These surveys consistently show that most employees are dissatisfied with their performance review experiences.
Yet instead of questioning whether annual reviews are effective, most organisations respond by trying to improve their review processes. They add more training for managers, create more detailed rating criteria, or implement new software platforms.
This is like repeatedly repairing a fundamentally broken machine instead of replacing it with something that actually works.
The engagement survey data clearly indicates that traditional performance reviews don’t meet employee needs for feedback, recognition, or development support. But organisations continue investing in incremental improvements to systems that are fundamentally flawed.
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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Charles