• Performance was managed through a forced curve. Your rating depended as much on where you sat in the team as on what you actually delivered. I went from a strong rating one year to being put on a performance plan not long after, even though the quality of my work had not collapsed overnight.
• Distribution targets meant managers still needed a set number of weaker ratings each cycle. In practice this made the process feel political. If you were quieter, had time off sick, or were not part of the inner circle, you felt more at risk of being treated as “the issue”, regardless of your effort.
• When I raised concerns about a colleague’s behaviour and the impact it was having on my health, the focus quickly shifted onto how I should “take feedback” rather than looking closely at the behaviour itself. That made it hard to see HR as an independent route for dealing with problems.
• After I had time off with stress, my situation changed. I felt I was viewed more as a concern than someone to develop. Later performance processes, including the plan I was put on, felt more about documenting concerns than understanding context or giving me a fair chance to get back to where I had been.
• Workloads in my area increased after restructures, with limited flexibility around volume or deadlines. I saw people under pressure, making mistakes or burning out, and the response was often more scrutiny rather than questioning whether the set up was realistic.
• There was limited visible structure around how health issues or personal circumstances were handled. Any adjustments or flexibility seemed to depend heavily on individual managers, rather than being backed by a clear, consistent approach across the company.
• Towards the end there were further changes and my role was eventually made redundant. There was little sense of active redeployment or looking for other roles that might fit my skills and experience. It felt more like an exit route once I had been through performance processes, rather than a serious attempt to keep me in the business.
