Everyone hates them. Everyone still does them. Here is how to have one that actually helps someone grow.
Somewhere in the UK right now, a manager is dusting off a form they last opened in March, and quietly Googling "how to give constructive feedback" for the twelfth year in a row.
Welcome to performance review season, one of the most dreaded rituals in UK business, and one that almost never does what it is supposed to do.
Let’s make it clear from the start: A performance review should never be a surprise. If feedback only turns up once a year, in a room, with a form attached, something has quietly gone wrong in the other eleven months.
Why the traditional performance review keeps failing
The annual review model was built for a different era of work. Rigid hierarchies. Annual pay cycles. Managers who saw feedback as something to deliver rather than something to share. It treated people like line items to be scored and filed.
That model persists because it feels safe. Ratings feel objective. Forms feel defensible. But ask any manager who has sat across from someone crying over a "meets expectations" rating whether the system is working, and you will get a very different answer.
The five things to change this September
Kill the surprises. If someone is underperforming, they should know in July, not September. The review should confirm a conversation, and it should never open one.
Make it a conversation, not a lecture. A review where the manager talks for forty minutes and the employee nods is a lecture wearing a different name.
Rethink the rating scales. Numbers on a form rarely capture nuance, and they invite unfair comparison between people whose jobs and circumstances are entirely different.
Look forward as much as back. Spend real time on what happens next. Goals, growth, support, what is getting in their way. That is the bit that actually changes anything.
Say what you mean. Drop the corporate padding. "There is room to develop your stakeholder management" means precisely nothing. Tell them plainly what is working, and plainly what is not.
The real work happens before the meeting
A good performance review is only as strong as the conversations that happened before it. Managers who check in regularly, who give feedback in the moment rather than saving it up, walk into September prepared and confident.
The people who dread review season are usually the ones who have quietly avoided honest conversations all year.
One last thing
If your review process currently feels like theatre, that is your business asking for a slightly different way of doing this. The fix is not a new form or a shinier platform. It is a change in how often, and how honestly, your managers talk to their teams the rest of the year.
You know where I am.
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