- Write up self review. 1-2 pages to highlight what you worked on and accomplished, who you helped, why it matters. Score yourself on various dimensions of how good of a job you are doing (working with others, getting stuff done, etc.)
- Nominate 3-4 people to give you peer reviews. Best to pick people who can speak to your work, ideally with some folks from outside your particular group, and ideally with some seniority.
- Managers decide who to ask for peer review about whom. You'll get asked by various managers for feedback about their reports. Write and submit this feedback -- could be as short as a paragraph, more typically 2 or 3 paragraphs: what did you work on with them, what did they do achieve, what could have gone better? I've probably given feedback for 5-10 people on average.
- Manager synthesizes all of this into a report, score you on the same dimensions.
- Manager meets with you, gives you their report, goes over it with you. There's a lot to this meeting. It's a review of how they see your work, a comparison of your self-scores and their scores to get on the same page, a discussion of noteworthy feedback from others (positive and negative), a chance to defend yourself against any negative feedback, and a discussion of ideas for addressing any concerns. Typically there is also a lot of goal-setting for the upcoming year, and more generally a discussion of how things are going, how happy you are, and so on.
- Formally acknowledge that you discussed the report with your manager (checkbox in some system). This also gives you a chance to formally comment on the report, I imagine in case of some dispute.
- Followup meeting, some time later, deals with compensation adjustments, promotions, etc. This is kept separate from the review itself.
Effort level has been perhaps 2-3 days per year for writing up all the reviews. I'm sure it's worse for managers.
Not the OP but sounds like Google’s “Perf” process. You can take a search through HN and get a couple of accounts. Generally; you write how well you did, then you get a couple of peers to confirm it and give you feedback. Then your manager works with a bunch of other managers to “calibrate” to make sure their view of the world is not skewed (think you did poorly but you actually did well and vice-versa). Then you receive a rating based on that calibration.
