The Best Performance Reviews Never Happen in December

The best performance reviews don’t happen in December. They happen every week, in 1:1s and lightweight check-ins, with real-time recognition, immediate course corrections, and with feedback so woven into daily work that December feels like any other month. But that’s not the world most of us live in yet.

Every December, millions of people go through the same unspoken, anxiety-inducing experience amidst the upcoming holiday season and rush to meet year-end deadlines.

You open your laptop to find countless notifications: peer review forms due Friday. Manager 1:1 scheduled. Self-assessment needed before the holiday break. And suddenly, in the office, voices drop to whispers, people avoid eye contact, and the usual year-end camaraderie gives way to isolation as everyone retreats to their desk, wondering if they did enough over the last year.

The panic we associate with performance reviews rarely has to do with how well we did our jobs. More often it comes from the sudden flood of judgements from our peers and managers and the scramble to recollect memories of what we were most proud of, all at once, at an arbitrary moment in time.

We as a society have built a system where the grand reveal that influences promotions and compensation arrives in December. Yet the work we did to influence our team, company, and industry happened in January, February, and each month thereafter.

You ramped up that new hire in July. You stayed late to fix that production issue in September. But now it’s December, and you’re sitting across from your manager (or on a Zoom call, more likely), wondering which version of the past twelve months they’re about to present to you.

How this System Came About

Before we go blaming HR, or managers, or “corporate”, it’s worth acknowledging how we got here.

The annual performance review was built for a workplace that doesn’t exist anymore. Actually, it wasn’t even built for the workplace, it was built for the U.S. military.

Modern performance reviews trace back to early 20th-century military “merit rating” systems built to identify underperformers for discharge or reassignment, not to develop people. Corporate America later adopted the model to justify pay, promotions, and terminations, culminating in forced-ranking systems popularized in the late 20th century. Even as companies attempted to shift toward continuous feedback in the 2000s, the underlying structure stayed the same, leaving us with a system increasingly misaligned to how work actually happens today. That history is a thread we explore more deeply in The History of Performance Reviews.

Over time, this annual routine has become the one moment everyone is forced to talk about performance. And this routine has unintentionally encouraged a few harmful patterns.

The Batching Problem

Annual reviews inevitably create a feedback stockpile.

Management research has consistently concluded that frequent feedback is the most effective format for growth. Real-time course corrections, immediate recognition, and ongoing coaching all help employees both improve and feel valued. But when you know there’s a formal review every December, there’s little incentive to put continuous feedback into practice. Managers often shelve observations until review season, especially the contentious ones.

The Recency Trap

Impactful moments never distribute themselves evenly across twelve months. Even if they did, our memory wouldn’t recognize it, because human memory weighs recent events disproportionately. That presentation you crushed back in March is long forgotten (by both you and your manager), but the push to production that caused problems for customers in November is top of mind.

Everyone knows this by now, and many employees have learned to optimize for the recency bias they know exists, ensuring they have memorable wins that occurred in Q4. However, the quiet yet high-performers are often lost in the noise.

The Psychological Cost

Performance reviews go beyond creating logistical headaches for admins and managers involved. They create psychological distress, frequently called “performance review anxiety.” It’s the corporate equivalent of someone texting you “I have to tell you something,” but making you wait months to actually find out what they have to say.

Anxiety is a signal of missing feedback.

The knot in your stomach as you open your manager review isn’t about your performance, but rather what you don’t know yet. It’s about the feedback that you expected to receive throughout the year but didn’t.

When feedback is only given once a year, people start playing defense instead of being honest. They’re not thinking “how can I grow?” They’re thinking “how do I protect myself?”.

A Reddit post from just a few days ago captured this perfectly. A corporate employee asked the community regarding their upcoming performance reviews: “Is there any use in being critical or negative in my peer and upwards reviews?” to which many people responded with their takes saying things like:

“Corporate reviews have become a prisoner’s dilemma. Do I give honest feedback and risk negative repercussions? Or do I give a glowing review and hope everyone else does too?”

The statistically winning strategy, according to game theorists, is: be positive unless someone else isn’t.

Which is to say that the system doesn’t reward honesty. It rewards those who play the game.

So What Does the Future of Performance Reviews Look Like?

For decades, we accepted the limitations of the annual review because we didn’t have an alternative. Memory was the biggest constraint, as both managers and employees struggle to remember twelve months of work.

However, memory is no longer a constraint. The tools we use every day—Slack, Jira, Gmail, HubSpot—already capture what matters. The technology exists to solve the problems legacy performance reviews created.

Some companies are already leaning into this future. They’re using Devin’s AI to surface engineering impact from GitHub. Zapier to streamline the analysis of employee feedback by gathering submissions and generating summaries. And Windmill to remember every 1:1, project milestone, and piece of feedback automatically so reviews take minutes, not days and actually a full cycle of work.

Your next December could look a lot different. It could feel like any other month (minus the holidays of course).