Every company runs some kind of performance assessment process to get rid of its slack and reward its overachievers.
But EM process looks much more to a poorly executed interview process than to an assessment process.
The PDS is your resume. Your supervisor is the hiring (or, more precisely, your re-hiring manager, and the ranking meeting is the closed-door, after-interview meeting where all managers decide if you are (re)hired or not. If you are (re)hired, your compensation is decided in this meeting too.
As an interview process this is incredibly inefficient: 1) The resume highlights only the short term accomplishments, 2) Only one hiring manager gets to read your resume. 3) the rest of the (re) hiring managers only get to listen a 2 min curated version of such resume. 4) Only 1 hiring manager has a face-to-face interaction with each candidate, 5) The (re)hiring committee is assessing 100 candidates applying to 95 unspecified available positions.
If we accept that our employment with EM is a 1-year contract, then we need to accept that we are re-applying every year to renew such contract and being interviewed for it
What's difficult to accept is that such interview process is so poorly executed, and that it is marketed by managers as an improvement and coaching program.