You can watch this Meme Lesson on Feedback on YouTube.
When you are providing yearly feedback, you think you're reviewing a year. The best case you are providing feedback on last Monday.
What happens is that in November, before year-end reviews.
We spent forty-five minutes writing feedback for someone we managed for a year.
The preparation we promised in March didn't happen.
You have a few emails, a WhatsApp from September you vaguely remember being annoyed by, and the thing they did on Monday.
That is what you have. That is what the review is going to be.
This is what everyone does.
You are not a bad person for doing it.
The problem is that nobody admits this is what reviews actually are, so the employee sitting across from you in December believes they are receiving a considered judgement of their year, when what they are actually receiving is a considered judgement of whatever happened in October, plus whatever you felt about them on Monday.
The research has a name for this.
Recency bias.
Every performance review textbook names it on page three and then proceeds to recommend annual reviews anyway. Which is quite something, if you think about it.
But here is the thing the textbooks do not say.
You did not fail to remember. You failed to watch.
For most of the year, you were not observing them.
You were observing yourself.
Your own deadlines.
Your own meetings.
Your own manager and whether your own manager was happy with you.
Your team member was two metres away from you for eleven months, and you could not, under oath, say what they did during July.
The memory is not unreliable.
The memory was never made.
The worst version of this is not even the forgetting.
It is who gets remembered.
The people you remember are the people who did something visible — the presentation to the board, the lunch with the CEO, the all-hands where they said something that made someone laugh.
None of these is the actual work.
The actual work is what the person who does not get remembered spent ten months doing — quietly, in March, when nobody was looking, because it was not the kind of work that puts you in a room with senior people.
That person's review is going to be worse.
You will not mean for it to be.
But there is nothing of theirs in your memory.
Here is the fix.
It takes about thirty seconds a week and will change your reviews more than any training ever will.
Open a folder for each person.
One sentence a week.
Not an analysis, not a rating, just a sentence — what they did, what you noticed, what happened.
By November, you have forty sentences.
You read them in order.
Most likely, you will have your review.
Your memory is not an archive.
It is the last three emails, and whoever was in the room on Tuesday.
Stop writing reviews from it.
