How to Write a Review for an Employee

Performance review season can be a daunting menstruum for both direction and employees.

One-sided conversations, mixed messages and wordy documents exit both parties feeling like they have the same, stressful chat each time.

But if you take the right approach, quarterly performance reviews are an crawly opportunity to reinforce solid habits, redirect poor traits and bulldoze professional growth for your employees.

In this mail, I'll give you tips from my own experience as an 60 minutes manager to make the operation review process a lot more painless, plus performance review examples y'all can customize now.

 

Performance review examples and advice:

• What is a performance review?
• Performance review examples and templates
• Self operation review examples
• Quarterly performance review examples
• Almanac performance review examples
• Simple performance review examples
• What's the purpose of a functioning review?
• Useful performance review phrases
• How to write a performance review

What is a performance review?

A performance review is a regulated assessment in which managers assess an employee's work operation to place their strengths and weaknesses, offer feedback and assist with goal setting.

The frequency and depth of the review procedure may vary by company based on company size and goals of the evaluations.

This quarterly performance review example has sections for both achievements and areas of improvement. It also has a section for core values, as this must be a primal performance indicator at this visitor. Unlike companies will have different measuring sticks for success.

 

Q: Tin I customize the operation review templates in this post?

A: Yes, you tin! All the templates are easy to edit. Some templates are costless, some are paid.

Click any template and y'all'll be asked to sign upwardly for gratuitous. You lot'll enter our online editor. Edit the text, utilise your make colors, add pages, upload your logo and more than. Share a link for free. Upgrade to our Plan for Professionals to download in PDF or PowerPoint format and access premium features and templates, such as real-time team collaboration and one-click branding.

Functioning review examples and templates

To behave an effective performance review, it's important to evangelize a positive and solution-focused message. This will exist less discouraging to the employee.

This performance review example  shows how you can offer constructive feedback, while also praising the employee's efforts. The majority of the sections focus on the employees' achievements and strengths.

Suggested areas of improvement is positioned in the middle, letting managers cushion criticism with praise.

This performance review instance shows how managers tin can give constructive feedback to their employees by giving them articulate direction on what things to keep doing and what deportment to take in future.

While Felicia did non run into her goal, her director acknowledges that the goal was set deliberately high and that 74 percentage of the goal still has significant impact.

This employee review form likewise points to specific positive behavior, such as self-teaching, teamwork and a strong piece of work ethic.

There are also specific recommendations for improvement, such as putting together a plan to get more than press mentions and scaling her experiments.

 

Some other way to do a operation review, or kick off the process, is to use a quadrant. Both the employee and manager tin plot where they think the former falls on sure cardinal values and build out discussion points from there.

Yous can change "go it done/become it right" in the employee review template below to "upholds core values/contributes to visitor civilization" for example.

 

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Self functioning review examples

In a self performance review, employees assess themselves using the same rubric as their managers would and submit them to HR and/or their manager prior to their official review meeting.

The do good of doing self-assessments accept caused them to become a mutual office of the employee review throughout many companies.

Cocky assessments are an encouraging opportunity for employees to share their thoughts near their task, goals, desired responsibilities and aspects of either their role or environment that they may exist struggling with.

Set employees up for success in the self assessment process past giving them a robust employee evaluation course with thoughtful questions.

Annual self evaluation employee review template

This showtime example is perfect for a thorough annual review. The targeted questions prompt the employee to reverberate on their achievements and shortcomings, while also rating themselves on specific skill sets required for their task.

 

The above employee cocky-assessment example allows for multiple sign-offs, plus a section to list colleagues who can back up the employee's statements.

Yearly performance cocky evaluation templates

A yearly performance self-evaluation isn't only a great run a risk for employees to assess their by performance.

It's too a way for employees to program for their professional future every bit they can see where their strengths lie and what skills they need to build to movement upwards in the visitor. An annual self-evaluation tin likewise build an employee's case for their compensation review.

This employee cocky-evaluation grade is broken into sections that cover all these factors: about your task, achievements, goals and professional person development.

 

This yearly performance self-evaluation template has space to expand on goals met and alignment with cadre values, as well as skills they'd like to build in the future:

 

Cocky-cess employee review forms

Many functioning reviews are incredibly detailed. Sometimes, a higher-level overview is all that's needed.

Quadrant evaluations, like the template below, are a great way for employees to do an assessment and for managers to quickly add their ain evaluation, without getting into the weeds.

Employees can add what'southward being evaluated in the easy-to-edit template beneath (instead of get it washed/do it right). The employee adds an icon where they think they autumn in the quadrant, and the manager does the same, with room on the last page to further break downwards the evaluation.

Sounds tough? Our existent-time collaboration feature (part of the Business Program) lets both director and employee piece of work on the same doc online, leave comments, share private links and more than.

 

The cocky employee review class below lets the employee write out their job description. That way, they tin can reference their deliverables in the Goals Achieved and Areas of Excellence sections and directly demonstrate their impact on the system:

 

How Do I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign up for gratuitous and enter the Venngage editor. Click any text box to change the words or the font. Cull from brand fonts (you can gear up this), template fonts or from our font library. There are enough of modernistic options. This article on how to choose fonts tin can help you determine.

This self performance review case gives employees the chance to reverberate on their achievements on a quarterly basis.

This manner, employees can demonstrate meeting quarterly goals. Information technology can likewise give them a risk to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses and have a gamble to deed on them before their big annual review:

 

How Exercise I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign up for free and enter the Venngage editor. Desire to change the background colors? Click whatever department then select a new color from the colour picker tool. Yous can choose from a colour from the color cycle, one of your brand colors (use My Make Kit to ready this upward) or pre-set up template colors. Or enter a HEX lawmaking if you lot want to go super specific.

Self-assessments also help enlighten managers of how employees sympathize their identify within the company's arrangement and civilisation.

The information disclosed in self-assessments should serve equally a major element of official performance reviews in club to ensure that both a 2-way conversation occurs and that the needs of both parties are being met moving forward.

To brand for the near effective cocky-assessments, employees should be sure to consider how their managers' perceptions of their performance varies from their own.

With this in mind, the information shared in a self-assessment can guide or pivot a manager's perception and assessment of an employee's performance.

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Quarterly employee performance review templates

Quarterly reviews are important because they provide multiple opportunities for employees to receive helpful feedback on how to improve as the year progresses.

This quarterly performance review example reflects on specific areas of improvement, such as scaling her experiments and developing content partnerships.

 

How Exercise I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign upwardly for free and enter the Venngage editor. Want to add a text box? Click "Text" in the left-hand navigation bar. Drag the text box you want onto the sail ("Text" is good for body copy). Then, click the text box and start typing!

Quarterly reviews from Q1 to Q3 serve as a means of providing specific, deliberate feedback to employees then they know exactly how to improve on their goals and skills.

This enables the concluding, annual evaluation conducted at the end of Q4 to serve as a final assessment that will take the about weight in determining how the employee will excel into the next year, discretionary bonuses, salary increases, etc.

Quarterly reviews offer a documented and tracked record of an employee's progress throughout the year.

This ways that each quarter should be assessed using the aforementioned rubric throughout the entire twelvemonth. This will help in ensuring an authentic representation of an employee's development is recorded.

That means, if yous apply the below employee review template in Q1, you lot should besides utilise information technology again in Q2 and Q3:

 

Quarterly employee review template

This quarterly review template is a more than condensed version of the case in a higher place.

If you'd like to keep your quarterly reviews short and to the point, this template will suffice. Employers can and then use the expanded version above for their almanac review.

 

How Do I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign upwardly for free and enter the Venngage editor. Want to modify the text? Click any text box to open up the text toolbar in a higher place the canvass. From here, alter the alignment and size, add bold or italic styling and add numbering or bullet points, too. Information technology behaves just similar whatsoever other text editor yous've used before, so it'due south simple to learn.

Employee self evaluation sample answers

It's too important for employees to annotate and reflect on their reviews.

They can both point out specific milestones that were missed:

• I generated five new leads and, as a issue, I exceeded my sales quota by 20%
• I wrote a blog mail based on original research that doubled our organic traffic in June

And also to acknowledge areas of improvement:

• I recognize that I need to form new content partnerships. I plan to practise so in Q3 by putting together a list of 10 potential targets based on past linkbuilding partners and sending a customized pitch electronic mail.

 

How Practice I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign upwards for free and enter the Venngage editor. Want to add your logo to the top of this template? Click the "My Brand Kit" tab in the editor. You lot can import your logo from your website. Drag and drop it onto the sail. Y'all're washed!

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Annual performance review templates

At large organizations, there may not be enough resources in order to devote the fourth dimension needed to conduct quarterly performance reviews for every employee.

This is also true in the instance of a supervisor who has a large number of direct reports working for them whereby fourth dimension management is their master event.

In these situations, an almanac performance review would work all-time, especially if the employees being evaluated are experienced in their line of work and have been with their company for a long time.

Annual employee performance review templates

In this employee review template, staff are evaluated on only iv factors: ability, goals, areas of improvement and core values:

 

How Do I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign upwards for free and enter the Venngage editor. Change the background quickly by clicking the "Groundwork" tab in the left-paw navigation bar. Choose from your brand colors or pre-set template colors. Add a gradient or design, if you like. Click "Disengage" at any time to fix a mistake.

Annual evaluations are typically geared towards determining employee raises and discretionary bonuses.

Regular one-on-1 meetings between direct reports and managers throughout the grade of the yr would be a great fashion to supplement this process.

This annual employee review template can simply include scores (out of 100 etc.) in each box. Or put notes in each section to explain the overall performance score.

 

How Exercise I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign up for complimentary and enter the Venngage editor. Yous can move any element in our templates just by clicking it and holding. Elevate the text box, column, row, paradigm etc. to a new spot. Alter the size by grabbing a corner of the bounding box and making it bigger or smaller. Information technology'due south as unproblematic as drag and drop.

This being said, annual appraisals would demand to have a more general approach to evaluating employees providing a summary of their performance over the year.

The following employee review template takes a graphic arroyo and neatly summarizes overall performance using a score out of 100 for factors such every bit adaptability and projection quality:

 

How Practise I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign upwards for free and enter the Venngage editor. The charts in this template can easily exist changed to fit your stats. Click any chart and our nautical chart editor will open. For example, you could click the blueish donut Aptitude nautical chart and enter the number "60." The chart volition automatically arrange. It'south that easy.

Employee evaluation examples

Aside from the categories in the template above, there are a number of other factors that employers can utilize to evaluate operation.

Common operation review skills:

• Interpersonal skills
• Quality of work
• Communication
• Innovation
• Problem solving
• Adjustability
• Teamwork
• Growth
• Punctuality and attendance
• Self-education and learning
• Accountability

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Uncomplicated functioning review examples

Even if you desire to do a bones performance review, you should always include:

1. Elements of the employee'due south strengths.
2. Areas for which the employee can develop.
3. How the employee contributes/could contribute to the company'due south core values and culture through performance and actions.

This performance review mind map shows the basics for setting up a simple yet effective performance review–from setting specific goals to soliciting employee feedback.

 

A simple performance review should notwithstanding reflect the goals of your business's performance review direction system–and this will vary by visitor.

Information technology'south important to sympathise the purpose of your assessment earlier determining what information will exist required to assess in order to run across the goal.

For case, some smaller companies may utilize performance reviews throughout the year to track employees' development and growth.

While other, larger companies may use performance reviews to summarize employee operation, assist to calculate the priorities of the new year's day, adapt compensation or found bonus amounts.

An HR checklist can come in handy to streamline the process.

Elementary employee review template

Each of these elementary employee review templates are easy to edit in our online editor. Customize the text to match your own criteria, add together your brand colors, upload your logo, add or delete pages then share a private link or download in PDF or Powerpoint formats (Business Plan only).

This template uses quadrants to see how employee and manager evaluations friction match. Or only use it for cocky-assessments or manager assessments.

 

Simple performance review template

This more traditional functioning review template focuses merely on large categories, similar coming together goals, areas of excellence and areas of improvement.

 

How Do I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign up for free and enter the Venngage editor. Click the "My Make Kit" tab to add your brand colors with one click (we'll catch them automatically from your website). Or effort i of our custom color palettes. Click "Shuffle" to try different color combinations.

Simple employee review form

The beneath course is an even more condensed version of the above. Utilize information technology for a quarterly review to keep things focused or fifty-fifty for an annual review to aid you and your written report stick to the virtually of import points. Change the text to include your ain categories of evaluation.

 

How Practise I Customize This Template? Click the template, sign upwards for complimentary and enter the Venngage editor. If y'all demand to add new text boxes, open the "Text" tab and drag a text box onto the sheet. The text box volition resize equally y'all type.

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What's the purpose of a performance review?

At Venngage, our people are at the core of everything nosotros practise equally a business organization–whether it's developing new features on our tool, growing our international reach or coming together customer needs.

With a people-focus within our company, we are passionate about continuous learning and improvement, self-reflection, creating great client experiences, owning our jobs, teamwork and making our office feel like a 2nd dwelling

It should come at no surprise that our leadership team spends a considerable corporeality of fourth dimension at the end of each quarter conducting performance reviews with each of their straight reports.

 

Here are some things nosotros've learned near how to conduct effective performance reviews:

1. Make it articulate at the showtime of a new hire's employment how and when employees volition be evaluated. This should be part of your onboarding process and is specially important if you lot're managing a remote team.
2. Allow employees to gear up for their review by completing a self-cess prior to their appraisal, then allow the employee to walk their manager through the reasoning behind their self-cess.
3. Deliver a positive and solution-focused message (whenever possible), this will result in a less discouraging bulletin.

 

To brand the nearly of the actual review conversation with your employee, it's of import to avoid:

1. Full general, vague feedback; be specific on which behaviours you desire your employee to keep, stop and explore.
2. Making it personal; feedback is most actions and behaviour, not the person.
3. Loaded language; focus on asking what and how , not why .  Enquiring why someone acted the manner they did is akin to searching for a 'motive' and may come across accusatory.

 

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Useful performance review phrases

Grappling with what to say at your side by side performance review? Choosing the right words is important to make the review equally constructive and effective as possible, not to mention motivating for your employee. Here's a list of constructive performance review phrases for managers and reports.

Functioning appraisal comments for managers:

• She replies to calls, emails and instant messages in a timely mode (within 24 hours etc.)
• He has a talent for thinking exterior the box
• She tends to be risk-adverse and prefers traditional approaches to creative ones
• She maintains a culture of transparency in her squad and encourages cognition-sharing across all teams in the department.
• He consistently gives reports the training and resources needed to meet their goals
• He is biased and openly favors some employees over others on his team
• She is skillful in communicating hard decisions and messages to her team
• She creates chaos and miscommunication in her team by consistently communicating dissimilar messages to different reports
• You embody a "win together lose together" philosophy
• Your ability to reverberate, plan and act is the primal to your fantabulous performance
• He uses his seniority to endeavor to dominate and/or intimidate reports
• He excels when working alone but has problem working collaboratively with a team
• He consistently meets his deadlines and prioritizes tiptop goal work
• She consistently focuses on lower-value work instead of loftier-lever activities.

Performance review phrases for employees:

• Tin can you tell me more about what you mean?
• I want to be certain I sympathize (your expectations)
• Let me give you a footling more context here
• What would it look like if I was performing at a meridian level?
• What would I demand to do to score college on this?
• Permit'south talk over my goals and priorities for the the next quarter/year.
• Is there a way to go more frequent feedback about my operation between evaluations?
• How volition I know if I'g on track between evaluations?

How to write a operation review

Having an employee-friendly performance review procedure tin non only make or break the evolution of your employees but also disrupt the human relationship between managers and their reports.

Beyond creating a robust operation review strategy and performance review course, managers must also consider their delivery of the appraisals. Communicating a performance review effectively is the final affect to executing a constructive, celebratory and effective review procedure.

 

When creating an effective assessment, it's important to include the post-obit:

1. Calculate an overall rating for the employee; although a managing director will exist highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of an employee's behaviour, it will aide the employee's morale to communicate how the employee averaged on this rating calibration.
2. Ensure the employees are engaged in their own reviews; thus, be sure to include the employees' goals and developments toward reaching such goals in the assessments
3. Celebrate employees improvements; highlighting an employees' developments are a powerful way to impact employee date and boost overall team performance
4. Company culture and values; dedicate a department of the assessment to evaluate how employees marshal with the visitor's core values thus contributing to a positive visitor culture

 

Based on my involvement on building out our own effective performance review process at Venngage, I propose taking the following steps into consideration when constructing a operation review:

1. Set expectations early

Early in an employee's career with a company, managers should communicate the details of their review procedure including the expectations. Information technology should exist included in your employee handbook, for instance.

In this way, managers set and communicate clear expectations of the fundamental task functions and competencies of the part when an employee joins the visitor. The information presented in performance reviews should align with this define besides every bit use familiar linguistic communication and terms. This strategy will piece of work to eliminate any potential confusion or surprises for both parties.

2. Don't arrive personal

Feedback is about actions and behaviour, not the person.

When writing a performance review, it helps to accept a look at the upshot(s) yous've included and ensure that they employ to actions and behaviour of the employee rather than the personal attributes of said employee.

This will too aid to regulate the data mentioned in the review, to guarantee it is relevant and appropriate information.

iii. Beware of biases and limitations

While there may be a general 'right' way of doing things, there are often multiple — and equally good — ways to reach the same cease goal.

Please ensure your review is not biased or limited in favour of your personal work style and beliefs. Endeavor to consider the diverse aspects of the employees function and feel that may impact their decision to pursue alternative methods or working habits. Be compassionate towards these factors when writing your review.

4. Be specific

The information presented in the review should exist task-focused, clear and to the point.

Full general comments will exit an employee feeling confused and in the nighttime every bit to what aspect of their work needs to be corrected or how they can pursue improvements.

Failing to be directly in your messaging will touch the way your message is received and create farther confusion near what the expectations are. Managers should be specific on what behaviours of their employees that they are celebrating and what actions require improvements.

4. Offer guidance

Managers play a critical office in understanding the career goals of their employees and crafting development opportunities to help their reports achieve their goals.

It is important equally a manager to offering your advice and expertise to your employees to help farther their development.

If, as a effect of the feedback given, the employee (or yourself) may feel as though they demand additional training, consider the benefit of workshops, mentoring or coaching.

Be certain to use performance reviews as a way to guide employees whether it is toward further greatness or for areas requiring some improvement.

5. Follow up

Follow upward in writing and cheque in continuously to ensure comeback.

Both managers and employees should receive a copy of the review to refer back to moving forward.

Whether reviews are scheduled annually or quarterly, they should be a continuous topic of discussion for both managers and employees. When writing a review, ensure that the review is articulate and specific. Beingness mindful of this will help to ensure the employee can hands refer dorsum to the class on their own after the meeting.

 

Takeaway: Create a functioning review strategy before writing an employee'south review

Having an employee friendly performance review process can not only make or pause the development of your employees and but likewise disrupt the relationship between managers and their reports.

That's why information technology's crucial to create a robust operation review strategy and employee evaluation form earlier implementation to ensure the procedure is both constructive, celebratory and constructive. This will even assistance you in the time to come if you choose to write a letter of recommendation for the employee as yous'll have all his performance reviews to reference.

By considering the six steps above when writing a performance review, you'll take completed the terminal footstep in executing an employee-friendly review process.

The satisfaction gained from an increase in employee engagement and people ability will make the effort expended on administering operation reviews entirely worthwhile, and ensure yous have more effective reviews moving frontward.

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