It's communication, essentially, and humans absolutely suck at communication. No one is on the same page about it. The purpose of annual reviews is unclear, mi

It's communication, essentially, and humans absolutely suck at communication. No one is on the same page about it. The purpose of annual reviews is unclear, misunderstood, and misinterpreted, leading to a broken implementation in practice. Even when there is an attempt at clarity, emotional kneejerks interfere anyway. ex: Telling someone that they "Meet Expectations" when those expectations are very high just results in them feeling like you've called them "average" somehow, and people outside that process are absolutely going to misinterpret it as "Average" leading to a continuing failure to get somewhere constructive. Most of the time, there aren't great ways to be usefully objective about performance, anyway, due to missing context.