The WSJ has a story about Facebook giving a lot of people bad performance reviews. I spent 47 years getting and giving performance reviews. I didn’t like them. I don’t think they achieved much. They are time consuming. Often, with substandard employees, you will read about the same problems in years of reviews, and nothing ever gets fixed. That is mainly becaue people are pretty much finished by the time they hit middle school and can’t be changed.
The only performance reviews that I think are worth a hoot are ones that look at whether an employee has achieved certain training or skill milestones, or has reached a certain output. If goals can’t be quantified, then reviews are just more or less anecdotal and depend on what the supervisor remembers from the preceding three weeks.