A Simple (and Relatively Painless) Performance Review Template

I hate performance reviews.  When I started my career at Motorola, I remember dreading what crazy new spin our human resources department was going to use to torture my boss, torment my direct reports and drive me crazy.  

There were many excruciating variations: peer-to-peer, top down, button up, rank your colleagues, technicians rate the engineers. One even required colored markers to complete.  If you want to see grown men squirm, film a 60-year-old male engineer reviewing a 24-year-old female direct report.  When I think back on it, these real-life “performance” reviews would have made an excellent SNL skit.  

So when started my business fifteen years ago, I swore off performance reviews.  If my employees were doing a good job, I’d let them know it and vice versa.  And that worked until our team started growing larger. I found most employees wanted reviews.  And I needed ways to justify salary adjustments to make my lawyer happy and to give employees ways to know if they were meeting goals and growing.

So I created a performance review template of five questions and one goal statement that’s easy to complete and quite useful.  It takes less than 30 minutes to complete and 30 minutes to review via phone or in-person.  

Current Responsibilities

Create a bullet list the employee’s responsibilities for the review period.  I tried to keep these to one line per bullet and cover just the high-level categories.  

The Five Questions

• Question 1:  Evaluate and discuss the employee’s job performance.  
• Question 2:  Are there areas of exceptional performance that should be particularly noted?
• Question 3:  Are there areas of performance needing more attention or improvement?
• Question 4:  State and discuss expectations and goals for the upcoming review period.
• Question 5: What’s something you’re going to learn to do next year that scares you?

While the first four questions are pretty vanilla HR questions, the last question is my and the employees’ new favorite. I recently learned Microsoft includes it on their reviews. I also create a scary goal for myself and share it first with them before they offer theirs.  This goal totally breaks the ice and creates a spirit of teamwork: we’re all doing scary stuff together. We’re learning and growing, and that’s exciting. Doing edgy and uncomfortable activities together cements our culture.

Employee Comments

Included at the end of the review is space for the employee to record unedited and unfiltered comments because I feel it’s important for her to record her opinion, even if I might not agree with it.  

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Once I’ve conducted the phone or in-person review, I give employees one final chance to review and propose any changes.  Then we both sign and date.  We use Zoho People as our HR system. However, you can use any secure confidential file storage system to save the documents.