Slowly, the middle-aged woman takes her head up from the desk, stares at the A4 pages strewn on her desk and purses her lips in defeat.

Finally, she gets up, stretches, plugs in the phone again, and stubs her fore finger on the '0' button.

"OK, I'm ready for the next one, send him up."

Annual reviews are a disaster story for most of us, and a horror for those who have to give them. They may pass without violence but there'd be buckets of blood on the walls if the psychic subtext was played out for real.

These are dramas of pregnant pauses, surface politeness, subtle power-games and occasional real head-on collisions for those plucked from the norm group of mid-scoring ordinary survivors.

As 75% of us wrongly rate our performance at work as being up there with the top 25%, there's no avoiding the fact there's an anomaly to be faced down at review time.

However awful it is for those being appraised, as their eyes roll and their cynical smirks are shared with the other underlings preparing for the charade, the real victims in the newly-found panacea to all things performance-related are often hapless managers and supervisors not adequately equipped for this display of corporate modern manners.

What doesn't make everybody hate you might just make you hate yourself; for a few extra euro and the minuscule taste of power management brings, there's the very unlovely prospect of having to sit down your "team" a few times a year and use a crude . . . and often meaningless . . . socalled measure to mark them out as good or bad, and make them take it seriously.

Unfortunately, although performance management/appraisals and review systems have gained a large following among HR departments, as we know them, they are more likely to align performance with an Academy Award than with any really properly appraised improvement in the bottom line.

These systems often reflect not what the person did, but the conditions in the organisation and the performance system itself. The individual is a minor event in all this and gets lost in the process so actions are not accurately or adequately assessed.

Sometimes knowledge, skills and motivation . . . the fundamentals of people's behaviour at work . . . vie for attention. Skills are the most visible and so displays of skill are a necessity. Knowledge can be ascertained and is measurable. But motivation is a bit "out there" so when resources are slim, there's a collision of the three and the one that gets lost is the latter.

Performance measuring then takes place without a thought for how measuring processes interfere with motivation and trust, and the very act of reviewing can demotivate otherwise wellmotivated employees.

You can't just "leave aside" motivation for a few hours while we get people to improve.

The review process undoes what the mission statement and all the other organisation-serving guff does . . . the review meeting often means "we don't really trust you, we need to keep tabs on you and give you an imposed 'rating'.

You didn't fall for that fairytale about being the place's most valuable asset, did ye?"

For reviews to really do what they say they do, they would:

>> align organisational goals with individual goals starting with the individual;

>> spend time to find and create some fit;

>> consider how processes in place help people meet real process and product targets.

Reviewers would:

>> search out organisational blocks, which may be him or her;

>> seek the anchors, asking all the time "how can we make it easier for you?";

>> confidently discriminate bad from good performance, mediocre from outstanding.

"Performance" itself would not merely be a numbers game, but a real amalgam of how things were done, the quality of the methods, not just the amount of the output.

We ignore the means by which we do things at our peril, as looking at the "ends" doesn't help us learn anything. We have to trust the system so that we can say "Aileen achieved more this year than John did but that's not as important as how she did that; lets do it differently next year".

A good review system has a competent, trained, emotionally intelligent reviewer.

The irony is the number of untrained, incompetents carrying out appraisals of other people's competencies. Too many wreak havoc on the entire system by bringing in subjective remarks to the process: "I don't feel you really like this department"; "My hunch is you could work harder" . . . the death knell to any reliable review and undermining its raison d'etre of objectivity and consistency.

The trend towards accountability is obviously a good one and one which should fit nicely into psychological science's reward and punish approach. If managers are too nervous and unskilled to venture from the midrange '3' ratings, the review process is not meeting any of its own standards and should get thrown out and another approach adopted.

Going to the review has become like buying lotto tickets. Way back when it started, we all thought we might come out winners. Six months in, we kept hoping and occasionally bought into it, but got a bit fed up not winning and soon the little metallic tickets and the emailed invites to the meeting similarly took on a sinister edge.

A year or two in, many of us morphed into a faithless bunch who settled into it, still idealistically dreaming of a huge win but never even buying any tickets.

When the review seems like a lottery, we find a way to manage our expectations and to stop ourselves being disappointed. So, we settle for the '3', but hang on to the illusion that we're really worth a '5', thus collapsing disappointment with hope and undermining all notions about reviewing being an objective process.

When we put it all down to random chance anyway, there's as little point buying the lottery ticket as there is trying hard to get a good appraisal. End of story.