This week
Can Your Manager Stand Behind Your Review?
Your review arrives. It's well organized, warmly worded, and oddly smooth. Every strength comes with a tidy example. Every growth area is framed as an opportunity. Somewhere in the second paragraph you start wondering whether your manager wrote it.
Odds are they had help. In an August survey by Highwire, which sells workplace coaching, 78% of managers said they'd used AI to help with feedback or a performance review in the past year. Only 16% of employees said they'd been told AI played a role in their most recent review, and 40% suspected it or weren't sure.
That help isn't automatically bad. More people in the survey said their feedback had become more specific and actionable than said it had become more generic. A manager who turns rough notes into clear sentences with AI may write a better review than one staring at a blank page at 11 p.m.
What matters is which part of the review got the help. Organizing observations, tightening a paragraph, finding a kinder way to say something hard: that's writing. Deciding whether someone exceeded expectations, which project counted most, whether a missed deadline was a careless slip or a smart bet that didn't land: that's judgment, and a tool can't supply it because it wasn't there. Highwire's CEO, Liza Streiff, told HR Dive that AI doesn't know "how someone has grown over the year, and that context is the whole point of a review."
Remote workers have more riding on this. Without hallway conversations to fill in context, the written review is often the only record of how your year went.
It also changes how people work. Two-thirds of the employees surveyed said they'd adjusted their behavior to protect themselves, by avoiding reasonable risks, waiting longer to ask for help, or downplaying mistakes. Streiff connects that to reviews nobody explains: "When employees suspect a tool shaped their review, and no one has told them how, playing it safe starts to feel like the smartest move."
If you're writing reviews this season, AI makes it tempting to hand off the hardest part just because it's easy to. That shortcut is expensive in trust. Use the tool for the wording, and put plenty of yourself into the substance: what you saw, what you think it means, where you'd push this person next. Before you send it, ask whether you could explain every rating and example without the draft in front of you. Any line you couldn't still needs your judgment.
If you're on the receiving end, you don't need to interrogate where the sentences came from. You can make the review easier to judge. Talk about your performance with your manager regularly, and ask for feedback on specific work as you go, not just once a year. Then the formal review is one data point among many. If it matches what you've been hearing all year, it hardly matters what helped write it. If it doesn't, you'll have specifics to point to instead of a hunch.
