Workers and bosses can disagree about a lot of things these days—working from home, “quiet quitting,” even what to wear to the office—but there’s one thing everyone can get behind: Performance reviews stink.
First developed by the US military in World War I, formal appraisal systems were adopted in later decades by influential companies, including General Electric Co., to shed poor performers. They’ve become universal—and universally loathed. A time-consuming, backward-looking, box-ticking process, they often reveal more about the rater than the person being rated.
