Sure!

It happens behind closed doors and never in writing to keep up the farce, but usually I’m given a paltry number of slots of people I can label as high performers. This is really a damn shame because most of my team members are great employees. This is used as a carrot to show that we do give raises and promotions after all, but the proportion is so small it’s effectively zero. I’m very clear to my team that trying to becoming a top performer to get a promotion is a bad investment. I do my best to communicate the futility without actually saying it literally in such a way that it could get me into trouble.

Next, they use a spreadsheet to figure who they can probably underpay based on a heuristic likelihood that person would actually leave vs current market rates. These automatically become the low performers ahem satisfactory. You’re penalized for being here longer or specializing in something with a small market. Everyone else falls somewhere between satisfactory and above average which makes little difference.

The performance reviews are merely weak documentation to show that somehow HR was “justified” by selectively highlighting strengths or weaknesses depending on the a priori decision of what your performance level was to be.

It’s a huge tautology with only one meaningful conclusion: you will be underpaid, and it gets worse over time.