Uganda and Lithuania Agree: The Annual Review Is a Lie, They Just Disagree on How Politely to Tell You

🇺🇬 Uganda · 🇱🇹 Lithuania

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Uganda, roughly nine in ten workers operate entirely outside the formal economy, which means the annual performance review — that great ritual of corporate self-improvement — is a document approximately 89 percent of the workforce will never see. In Lithuania, nearly everyone has one, filled out on time, filed correctly, and, according to the people who study these things, almost entirely disconnected from whether the company actually meets its goals. Between the two countries lies the full spectrum of what "feedback" can mean: from nonexistent to procedurally flawless and equally useless. Somewhere in that gap is the truth about performance management everywhere, which is that everyone hates it and nobody has fixed it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇺🇬 Uganda

🇱🇹 Lithuania

Uganda: The Review Nobody Filed

According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics' 2025 Labour Market Survey, informal employment sits at 89.2 percent nationally, and even stripping out agriculture, informal work still accounts for 87.6 percent of jobs. That is the largest fact about performance management in Uganda: for most workers, there is no HR department to run a review, no template, no calibration meeting, because there is, formally, no employer. The ILO's regional data on informality tells a similar story across East Africa, where accountability runs through kinship and reputation rather than paperwork.

Where formal appraisal does exist — the civil service, larger private and NGO employers — the record is not encouraging. A widely cited study of Uganda's civil service by researcher Gerald Karyeija found the appraisal system succeeding in barely 30 percent of cases, with feedback typically one-directional, outcomes kept confidential, and the exercise vulnerable to favoritism, tribalism, and neglect. World Bank assessments of Uganda's public administration have flagged inefficiency and absenteeism as recurring drags on service delivery — exactly what a functioning review process should catch. Uganda's performance review problem isn't that the feedback is harsh. It's that it frequently doesn't exist, and everyone has made peace with that.

Lithuania: The Review That Files Correctly and Fails Anyway

Lithuania has the opposite problem, which is arguably more embarrassing, since it comes with better paperwork. A joint study by WU Vienna and the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga — the 2019 "Contemporary Performance Evaluation Practices Survey," covering Latvian and Lithuanian organizations — found that while 87 percent of companies called evaluation central to strategy, roughly a quarter admitted their own process failed to achieve it. Almost half said appraisals were ineffective at attracting, retaining, or motivating staff. Only about 26 percent used calibration committees, the mechanism most associated with actually trusting the results.

Layered on that gap is a communication style outside managers routinely misjudge. Business guides describe Lithuanian workplace communication as sincere, evidence-based, and understated — directness at a low simmer, with concerns sometimes surfacing only after the meeting has ended. Older habits, a residue of the Soviet period, still show up in more traditional or state-linked firms as autocratic management and a tendency to tell visitors what they want to hear; newer and international firms run flatter, faster cycles instead. The result is a country where the review gets filed properly and still, by its own companies' admission, misses the point.

The Reckoning

Put them side by side and the irony sharpens. Uganda's problem is a near-total absence of formal feedback mechanisms, masked by a culture where relationships carry the information a review form would otherwise hold. Lithuania's problem is the opposite: a fully built, professionally administered feedback apparatus that, by its own industry survey data, still fails to retain talent or drive the strategy it exists to serve. One country lacks the form. The other has the form and still lacks the substance.

Hofstede-informed research suggests a partial explanation: studies applying the framework to Uganda's civil service describe a high-power-distance, high-uncertainty-avoidance environment where feedback flows one way by design, while Hofstede Insights places Lithuania among Europe's more restrained cultures, where composed delivery is the default even when the content is blunt. Neither disposition guarantees a review that changes anyone's trajectory. Uganda has solved the honesty problem by mostly skipping the exercise. Lithuania has solved the process problem and left honesty for future study.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A foreign hire in Kampala described going eighteen months without a single formal review, only realizing where he stood when a colleague quietly mentioned who was up for promotion; the actual evaluation, he learned, had happened in conversations he was never part of.

Expat.com Lithuania forum — A relocating professional wrote that she had braced for cold, harsh feedback based on Lithuania's reputation for bluntness, and was pleasantly surprised to find her manager's criticism was specific, factual, and free of the political hedging she'd dealt with at home — it just arrived without any small talk first.

Hacker News ("Work in Lithuania" thread) — A contributor recalled trying to soften a critical review with the "compliment sandwich" approach and watching it fall flat; his Lithuanian report later admitted the praise had made him suspicious the real message was being hidden.

Quora (Uganda expat thread) — A newcomer advised that in Uganda, showing up to informal social events with the team mattered more for how you'd eventually be assessed than anything on a KPI sheet, and that skipping them was the real career risk.

workinlithuania.com — A returning professional noted that after a review meeting, nothing was truly settled until it appeared in writing, since colleagues who stayed quiet in the room often raised objections separately, days later, once they'd had time to think it through.

Conclusion

The practical advice converges from opposite directions. In Uganda, invest in the relationships that function as the real appraisal system, and don't expect the paperwork to catch up to reality. In Lithuania, take the process seriously, put agreements in writing, and don't mistake a calm tone for a soft verdict, or enthusiastic praise for the whole truth. Neither system will tell you, cleanly and on schedule, exactly how you're doing. That, at least, appears to be one HR universal.