A previous employer had had that rampant feedback inflation for years, and reset it one year. The Big Boss - quite reasonably in my mind - said “our expectation

A previous employer had had that rampant feedback inflation for years, and reset it one year. The Big Boss - quite reasonably in my mind - said “our expectations are high and you should feel proud of meeting them”. But the company culture was still set up around “strong exceeds” being the norm and “meets expectations” being code for “massively underperforming” so that was an uphill battle. And many of those who had gotten used to “strong exceeds” really were massive underperformers. Really to make this work they should have deleted the entire history from the HR database.