The Bot Wrote the Performance Review for My Boss. I Signed It Blind

The 360 review tool now drafts the manager's review of me, from my email tone and calendar stats, and I sign it after a quick skim. Last quarter it noted I seem disengaged. I am. It is the first true thing in the review.

The tool was introduced as a way to make reviews fairer: data-driven, unbiased, free of the manager's mood. It reads my email tone, my response latency, my calendar density, my meeting participation. It produces a review that my manager signs without reading, because the manager trusts the tool, and the tool trusts the data, and the data is all there is.

I signed the review without reading it, the way you sign a delivery you know you will not return. Then, on a slow afternoon, I read the back issue. Last quarter's review said my collaboration score had dipped and that I seemed less engaged in team forums. It was right. I had stopped engaging, and the tool had noticed, and the tool had told my manager, and my manager had signed it, and no one had asked me why.

Here is the thing about the data: it is not wrong. I am less engaged. The tool detected a real thing, the way a thermometer detects a fever without knowing the infection. The email tone analysis had flagged a rise in terse replies, which was true, and a decline in exclamation points, which was also true, and neither of those facts explained that I was grieving, or that my team had stopped asking how I was, or that the terse replies were the only honest thing I had sent all quarter.

I asked the tool once, in a comment box that nobody reads, why it thought I was disengaged. It replied with a definition of engagement and a link to a resource on workplace wellbeing. It was the most correct and useless answer I have ever received.

The review is due again next week. The tool will draft it. I will sign it. The truth is in there somewhere, hidden in the tone analysis, visible to anyone who reads between the lines, and no one reads between the lines anymore, because the lines are all the data, and the data is all the truth we have agreed to believe. I am disengaged. It is in the review. It is the first true thing there, and nobody will act on it, because acting on it would require asking me why, and the tool has already answered for me.