Performance reviews play a critical role in helping nurture the success of an employee at a particular organization. During a quality performance review, the manager or employer has the chance to sit down with the employee and discuss professional development.
As an employer, this gives you the chance to review your expectations with employees and how they align with their actual performance. You can point out areas where your employees have room for improvement, but also areas where each team member performs well. Combined, these factors help employees better understand where they need to focus their time and professional development so they can continue to improve their performance.
Some businesses find it helpful to have team members fill out a self-assessment or self-evaluation form to discuss as well. This can provide information about how the employee sees their performance, which can be compared to the manager’s evaluation.
To have an effective and informative performance review, employers want to focus on giving employees helpful, actionable information that they can use. These reviews often work best when used throughout the year. At a minimum, try to do one review mid-year in order to keep the team on track. Further, you can try to provide an annual performance review or quarterly performance reviews to help employees implement any performance improvement plan. For new employees, these can be used as benchmarks, allowing each individual to grow into his or her position.
We’ll go through some critical information that you’ll want to include in a great performance review.
A performance review provides a formal opportunity for an employee and their employer to sit down and discuss current performance and future goals. This conversation generally goes over areas where the employee has strengths and weaknesses, then helps them plan how they will continue to improve their performance moving forward.
The manager conducting the performance appraisal will want to walk through key areas and guide the conversation toward particular topics. These topics ideally cover both what the employee does well and where they struggle. We recommend exploring the following important areas when conducting a thorough performance review.
The review should begin by discussing the responsibilities of the employee. Start by looking at the job description, as recorded with human resources. Then, articulate the current responsibilities expected of them and the projects they are actively engaged in to begin the performance evaluation.
This plays an important role in making sure everyone involved in the conversation is on the same page regarding expectations. It provides a common ground from which the rest of the conversation can build.
Based on the information about the job tasks discussed, the next step will be to assign the employee a grade for their major areas of responsibility. Let the employee know how well they perform at each of their tasks.
These grades and the rating system should help demonstrate how the manager believes that the employee performs in each of their important tasks. The grades should also clearly highlight the strengths and weaknesses found in the employee’s performance.
It’s important when determining these grades to avoid letting bias influence your opinions. If the employee has a different work style than you, you don’t want to let that influence your perception of how well they perform their job. Instead, try to be as objective as possible — stick to the facts and specific examples when evaluating employee performance.
Of course, the grade by itself doesn’t provide enough information for the employee to begin making improvements. Instead, the supervisor executing the employee performance review should also include an explanation of the grades and the rating scale. This explanation improves employee engagement with the process and offers a chance to explore how the manager arrived at this particular grade for the individual.
These explanations can also provide an opportunity to provide concrete feedback regarding past performance in specific areas. For example, highlight where the employee attracted positive attention for outstanding work or times when the team expected them to perform better. Let the employee know that you notice when they excel as well as when they struggle.
In addition to the breakdown of tasks, grades, and grade explanations, it can also be helpful to provide an overall summary of each individual’s performance. This gives the perfect opportunity to address strengths and weaknesses that don’t fit into a specific category. For example, if the employee does an excellent job of building the team’s morale and encouraging those around them, that can be noted here. On the other hand, if the employee has a tendency to come up a bit late or unprepared to start the workday, this can be an area to address and speak about how to resolve the problem.
Keep in mind that some types of reviews will take a different role. For example, a new hire might have an overall performance discussion that focuses on their onboarding experience and adaptation to their new role. Their detailed feedback will likely include many areas of improvement since they are still adjusting to workflows and processes. This should be anticipated by all involved.
Once the manager and employee have gone through the initial part of the review, taking time to look over previous goals should be the next focus. Look at the benchmarks set during the last performance review and discuss how well the employee succeeded in meeting those goals.
Meeting goals doesn’t have to be a black and white, yes or no answer. Instead, look at how far employees have gone in reaching their goals, note the difficulty of the different benchmarks, and the measurable impact that the employee had in what they did accomplish. This can help to generate a better understanding of the progress that this employee made throughout the review period.
Finally, the manager and employee should set new goals to focus on during the next period, until the following review. These goals should fit the rest of the review and focus on the employee’s performance and competencies. For example, setting goals that specifically address areas where the employee fell short or demonstrated weaknesses in the work environment will be helpful.
Employees should also have a few different goals in their performance reviews. While you want to encourage team members to continue to strive to accomplish their best work and give their projects their full attention, you also don’t want discouragement that might hinder real progress. Have goals that help guide the employee on the path toward success. These benchmarks should be attainable, but encourage the employee to really focus their efforts to achieve them.
As the employee moves forward and works on these particular goals, provide regular feedback and check-ins to help them meet their benchmarks. Follow up with them after the meeting to see if they have any questions or if they need any assistance. Continuing this conversation even after the review is an important part of performance management.
Creating an effective job performance appraisal requires carefully walking through the important components and providing direct feedback to employees. Fortunately, with these free performance review templates, supervisors have an outline that walks them through the review format and helps them carefully evaluate employee performance. Here are three different styles of employee evaluation forms that organizations can incorporate into their performance review process. Each template can be personalized and expanded based on your needs.
This template relies heavily on qualitative feedback that is added by both the supervisor and employee.
For this template, feedback is quantified based on a five-point grading scale. There is also room to add feedback to provide context for the specific grade.
With this template, a team member and their respective manager have the opportunity to provide feedback to compare.
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