One of the most stressful parts of the end-of-year process for managers is the dreaded performance rating.
This process forces you to boil down all of the work that a person did over the year, all of their accomplishments and misses, into a numeric score (often from 1–5) that may also come with words like ‘meets expectations’, ‘exceeds expectations’, or the unhappy ‘misses expectations’.
If you work for a company that has a ‘pay for performance’ model, your rating will influence the employee’s compensation. It may be used as an input for promotions, and yes, as a factor in firing or laying off employees.