Appraisal Meeting Cartoon – Are Annual Performance Reviews effective?

Ravi
Dec 2
2 min read

Black and white appraisal meeting cartoon where a female manager tells an anxious employee that his areas of improvement exceed the company’s bandwidth, prompting questions about annual performance reviews.

Annual performance reviews are treated as a sacred corporate ritual. This appraisal meeting cartoon comes from observing how employees walk into these discussions hoping for clarity and walk out with surprises, overloaded feedback, and a long list of “areas of improvement.”

It makes me question whether the annual review format even makes sense in today’s workplaces.

Annual Appraisal Meeting?

I’ve always wondered why we compress twelve months of work, mistakes, progress, and learning into one tense conversation at the end of the year. By the time feedback is delivered, the projects are over, the context has changed, and the chance to actually improve has long passed.

If the real goal is development, why do we wait so long?

Imagine if we:

gave feedback while the work was still fresh
corrected course before problems snowballed
coached people when they needed it, not months later
treated performance conversations as ongoing, not ceremonial

Instead, annual reviews often feel like a retroactive report card—a list of everything that went unsaid for months. And ironically, many “areas of improvement” exist because nobody stepped in earlier.

This cartoon is a reflection of that flaw in the system.

When Feedback Arrives Too Late to Matter

Annual reviews create a strange corporate time warp. A mistake made in February gets addressed in December. A skill gap noticed in April becomes a formal “area of improvement” at year-end. By then, the opportunity to grow has evaporated.

When feedback is delayed:

small issues become big problems
employees repeat mistakes unknowingly
managers store frustrations instead of resolving them
learning becomes accidental rather than intentional

In this cartoon’s exaggerated reality, the employee’s “areas of improvement” have grown so huge that even the company’s bandwidth can’t contain them — largely because nobody intervened when it mattered.