Best practices towards transforming reviews from tedious to simple. Learn how to make your performance review more than a box-ticking exercise with 15 sample questions and tips for meaningful feedback.
In this guide:
A performance review (aka performance appraisal, performance evaluation, or employee evaluation) is a method to evaluate and document an employee's job performance and behavior in a given period – typically six or twelve months.
Discussing performance in a structured review is a cornerstone of many organizations’ employee feedback and development processes. Keeping a formal record of employees' performance can also be a compliance requirement.
In modern feedback cultures, performance reviews are just one of many events in which recognition and constructive feedback are shared. The annual or bi-annual review supplements ongoing feedback conversations – like 1:1 meetings – and provides a clear path forward.
Are performance reviews outdated?
Contrary to popular belief, performance reviews remain a staple of organizational measurement and alignment, especially between managers and their teams. It's important to be able to deliver concrete, cyclical, and effective feedback to help team members grow and remain at your company.
In this guide, we explore recommended approaches that fit a modern approach to performance management.
With lightweight, real-time feedback available, sitting down to discuss the past year’s worth of assignments can feel untimely and unproductive.
When done correctly, performance reviews are an important way for employees to reflect on their work and refocus. Formal evaluations can't replace immediate feedback on daily tasks, and continuous feedback alone doesn't allow for the comprehensive reflection that performance reviews enable.
Employees need (and want) to know where they stand and how to improve. As such, Gallup highlighted clarity on expectations as a key driver of employee engagement. Performance reviews allow team members and their managers to agree on what’s working and what isn’t, and align on the best way forward. After six months or a year of reflection, the content of a formal discussion is bound to be important.
A big picture review also aligns an individual’s work with larger department goals and the company mission. With this in mind, setting goals and clarifying expectations will leave an employee with a fresh mindset on where they stand and a clear vision for their professional development.
Employee's perception of their manager is tied to how they deliver and receive feedback from their manager. That's why it's so important that when developing a performance review process, there is a focus on providing managers with the guidance they need to deliver effective feedback.
One aspect of measuring a leader's ability to deliver effective feedback can also be surfaced at a group level once they deliver multiple reviews. This is a great way to undercover misalignment between a manager's perception of performance versus their team's, and how well the manager is developing relationships on an ongoing basis. If the manager struggles to complete a performance review, it can indicate alignment issues.
Traditionally, performance reviews have been used as a basis for making pay decisions. An evaluation on paper, signed and agreed to by both parties, is often used to provide context and justification for whatever comes next. In case of any legal dispute – say, a former employee claims they were fired for reasons unrelated to their performance – a formal record of an employee's performance may also prove helpful.
More and more companies, however, are using performance reviews primarily as a tool to support their employees' growth and development. In times where retaining and developing talent is a means to survive as a business, a time-consuming process that only serves an organization's compliance needs feels out of place.
Despite the recent trend of companies ranging from Google to Deloitte ditching performance reviews, it’s important not to fall into the trap of giving up tried and true practices. Many people know and expect a formal performance review. Rather than dropping formal feedback, understand why you’re giving it and maximize its results.
Teams of any size often require a track record of performance to both help employees grow and to safeguard an organization. The modern performance review isn't about hiring and firing, but instead it provides important protection to both employees and managers to keep a track record of performance when making crucial employment decisions.
Employees who effectively document and track their performance are better prepared for future roles in or outside of an organization, and managers can obtain an overview of performance alignment within their own teams.
Performance review should not be tied to pay. Discussing pay and performance in the same conversation can compromise honesty, company culture, and the ability to grow. That's why it's becoming more popular to separate performance reviews from conversations that lead to pay or promotion decisions.
By removing pay from performance reviews and being explicit about the alternative framework for determining pay, companies can maintain a pay-for-performance culture without sacrificing opportunities for employee development.
Review processes tend to be overly complicated. People can feel like they spend more time in evaluations than actually driving professional growth or getting work done. Luckily, it doesn't have to be like this.
The employee appraisal should be simple and engaging, and even more so if it’s only one of many feedback and coaching opportunities in your performance management process.
A lightweight performance review process can look like this:
Simplicity is great, but there are a few things that might be worth adding to your performance reviews to enhance their effectiveness.
As the name suggests, 360° feedback (aka 360 reviews or peer reviews) is where an employee receives feedback from multiple angles within an organization. This feedback mechanism combines input from a number of sources - peers, direct reports, managers, self-assessment, or even customers.
Managers don’t see everything. 360° feedback helps avoid blind spots and biases influencing the assessment of employee performance. Making 360s part of appraisals allows for employees to be recognized for their full range of contributions to the organization, beyond the work tasks their reviewer might already be aware of.
If you’re interested in introducing more regular, multisource feedback into your organization, 360s can be a great place to start. But according to psychologist Kenneth Nowack, poorly designed 360-degree feedback assessments can increase disengagement and contribute to poor performance. So implementing 360s mindfully is crucial. Through this, companies can diversify feedback and gain rich results without overwhelming their teams.
Culture comes first. Having an open feedback culture can help employees feel comfortable giving and receiving feedback from peers without mistrust.
Consider these tips when introducing 360° feedback:
A performance review is made up of questions, so you want to make sure you’re asking the right ones. What you ask in your review form is influenced by many factors. The role you’re evaluating, your company culture, and your approach to feedback are just a few of them.
It’s worth thinking about what you want to achieve through your review, and whether your questions help you fulfill that purpose. Do you want:
Here are a few performance review form templates to get you started in the right direction.
Depending on why your organization uses performance reviews, you might only need two questions. If you’re looking for a very short and simple way to start a conversation around performance, ask these questions:
The start, stop, continue method is a popular retrospective design that also works for performance reviews. This structure focuses the conversation on specific actions that the employee should do more or less frequently.
The performance review questions look like this.
Structuring appraisals around multiple dimensions gives managers guidance on what exactly to assess. It also ensures employees are evaluated against the same criteria which can reduce the impact of biases. The dimensions you use depends and your organization's priorities, but we recommend to cover both functional and behavioral aspects.
How would you rate [Name]'s functional expertise?
Comments:
How would you rate [Name]'s ability to execute?
Comments:
How would you rate [Name] on their contribution to our business strategy?
Comments:
How do you rate [Name] on demonstration of company values?
Comments:
How do you rate [Name] on their overall impact to their team and company?
Comments:
Performance reviews that seek to evaluate an employee on their overall contribution to the company should use questions that reflect this. To assess impact, try using these sample questions as a starting point:
While performance ratings are still the standard for evaluating employees, they have come under scrutiny for their lack of insight and failure to help employees grow.
Companies need a way to ground pay and promotion decisions, and employees want to know where they stand. For these purposes, ratings can be one way to evaluate employees. Ratings are an easily quantifiable and comparable metric.
While ratings may be quick to give, they’re often hard to receive. “Your communication is a 3 on a 5-point scale.” So what? Even if ratings can identify areas for growth, they offer little guidance for the employee to actually grow in these areas. Studies have shown that ratings without guidance can be demotivating, especially for those who get below-average ratings, which in turn hurts performance.
Ratings have their role in performance reviews, but they also have their limitations. And this hasn’t gone unnoticed. Thirty large companies, making up 1.5 million employees, have already phased out ratings according to a 2015 study. But we must make sure that, if or when we phase out ratings, we replace them with a more effective feedback system.
There are ways to keep ratings in performance reviews while addressing some of these problems. The key is integrating feedback alongside the rating.
Bersin by Deloitte research found that in 2018, the highest performing companies had “growth and development” as the primary goal of their performance review process. Back in 2006, the top priority was still “competitive assessment" for 80% of the companies surveyed.
With this trend of focusing performance reviews on professional development, many companies have replaced ratings-based processes with processes focused on qualitative feedback.
Whether or not you keep ratings, it’s crucial that managers know how to give effective feedback, keeping performance reviews positive and productive. Here are three tips on giving effective feedback:
Performance reviews should by no means be a copy-and-paste exercise. Comments given have to uniquely and accurately describe the employee’s performance. But if you’re looking for inspiration, here are some sample review phrases and comments.
Recognize key accomplishments made by the employee you’re reviewing that moved the company forward.
Sample phrases:
Use examples of when the person lived one of your company’s values in a particularly impactful way. Making comments about value-related behavior is important in every organization that cares about culture.
Sample phrases:
Think about how this person’s efforts contribute to larger company goals. This automatically makes their achievements feel more meaningful and connected to the bigger picture.
Sample phrases:
Highlight individual strengths that had a positive impact on the company. This can help the team member capitalize on their strengths or identify blind spots.
Sample phrases:
Striving for fairness and objectivity is fundamental in performance reviews. Unfortunately, everyone has biases, and that includes managers.
Addressing unconscious bias is the first step to help you foster diversity and inclusion. Here’s a list of common biases, and how you can reduce their effect on your performance reviews.
Managers tend to focus on the most recent events and overlook events that happened earlier in the time period, which can hide important achievements and growth.
Try this: Use 1:1 meetings and other ongoing feedback mechanisms throughout the year, keeping a solid record that you can refer back to when writing your review.
A single positive or negative impression of an employee can influence the way managers view their overall performance. If a manager is particularly impressed by an employee’s performance in one instance, the manager may view that employee with a “halo” and assume that they also excel at unrelated tasks. The opposite effect occurs when a manager sees an employee struggle in one area and views them with “horns” and incompetence in other aspects of their job.
Try this: Evaluate performance in several defined aspects of work and have specific examples of behavior to back up praise or critique.
Managers who are inclined to give overly positive feedback leave employees unclear about how to improve, while highly negative managers can demotivate their team.
Try this: Do you tend to think of your team at a particular end of the traditional rating scale? Re-center your scale with a range of terms above and below your “go-to” rating.
Some managers are reluctant to rate at extremes. So they tend to put reports in the middle of the rating scale, leaving them without a clear takeaway of their strengths and weaknesses.
Try this: Even-number scales make a middle-rating literally impossible, but focusing on qualitative feedback instead of ratings is likely to be a more meaningful approach.
Managers can fall into the trap of finding new information that reaffirms their preexisting beliefs about an employees’ performance rather than truly examining all of the information.
Try this: Seek out feedback from others through a 360 feedback round, and pay special attention to anything that challenges your assessment.
When addressing a topic in a performance review, a manager can jump to the most obvious conclusion about what is important, as opposed to the less obvious but potentially more relevant ones.
Try this: Have team members share a self-review in advance to highlight key contributions that aren’t at the forefront of the managers’ mind.
Performance feedback given to women tends to reflect their workplace demeanor or attitudes, while men are more likely to receive feedback on past projects and accomplishments.
Try this: Plan to assess all employees on the same predetermined categories to avoid this unintentional disparity.
People are drawn to others who are similar to them, whether it be similarities in personality, behavior, skills, or background. When managers are more inclined to positively assess employees they relate to, this can leave little room for team diversity.
Try this: Review the criteria on which they are evaluating employees before entering a performance review.
The less structured a performance review is, the more room there will be for bias. Maintain consistency by outlining topics and criteria on which to assess every employee. Get feedback from multiple sources and really pay attention, especially if it goes against your initial perceptions.
Employees can only control their performance, not the bias in their review. It’s up to managers to recognize and actively fight their biases, and for HR to equip them with the knowledge and skills to do so.
Despite "paper-based" review forms now more commonly being created in spreadsheets or word processors, many organizations are opting instead to manage their performance appraisal through dedicated software.
Here are some of the reasons why organizations are abandoning paper-based reviews:
These three main issues have driven an increasing number of organizations to seek out performance review software. These tools aim to automate aspects of the review process while improving the quality of reviews and offering simpler data analysis.
Core features of performance review software often include are:
It can be difficult to choose the right performance review tool for your organization with so many options available. Our advice is to first consider what you want to achieve, and then select the tool that is best suited to help you reach those goals.
Your organization is medium-sized, focuses on employee growth, and aims to integrate the performance review with ongoing feedback mechanisms such as 1:1 meetings and praise? Then check out our performance review tool or request a personal demo.
Designing a performance management process that suits your organization is hard. This toolkit is here to help! In addition to a comprehensive guide, it includes a design worksheet and a planning calendar to put your new knowledge into action.
Healthy workplace relationships are crucial to a happier, more engaged workforce. In this guide, employee engagement expert Jason Lauritsen shares how to make goal-tracking, performance reviews, 360° feedback, 1:1 meetings, and ongoing feedback more human-friendly.
In this episode of HBR's advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer listeners' questions with the help of organizational psychologist Adam Grant. They talk through how to handle reviews that send mixed signals, are extremely critical, or don't provide enough helpful feedback.
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