Best practices when completing an employee review

Reviews are an important tool for determining, tracking, and evaluating employee goals and goal attainment. Not only do they help you evaluate how an employee is doing based on their competencies and job responsibilities, but they provide an opportunity for you and your employees to align on goals and map out how their work contributes to larger organizational objectives.

To accurately track employee goal progress and identify opportunities for growth, it’s important to ensure the feedback provided is clear, specific, and thorough. Utilize the following best practices to ensure you and your employees make the most out of this review process.

1. Preparing for the review

Build your template.

Reviews should contain questions that are objective, well-defined, and based on job-relevant competencies, skills, and goals. To get an accurate picture of how an employee is doing,  keep these questions specific to the core requirements and responsibilities of the person’s role. If you’re unsure of where to start, consider discussing core competencies with your HR team or your managers, or start with our Standard Review Template. Having a clear, consistent set of review criteria is particularly critical; your questions shouldn’t come as a surprise to your employees.

Consider different kinds of questions.

Once you’ve decided what kinds of competencies, skills, or goals your employees should be reviewed on, reflect on how you want to ask each question. Consider a blend of quantitative and qualitative questions, as this will allow for both structured feedback and more in-depth, open-ended reflection. Quantitative questions usually focus on collecting numerical data that asks about quantity or frequency (e.g., “How frequently did this employee complete projects on time?”), while qualitative questions provide an opportunity to seek open-ended responses with context beyond numbers or frequency (e.g., “How effective is this employee in collaborating with team members?”). When you ask a quantitative question, we recommend providing space to provide additional detail if needed.

Anchor quantitative questions.

If you decide to include quantitative questions, it’s important to use behaviorally anchored rating scales to ensure managers and employees are reviewing competencies consistently and in a way that reduces subjective bias. Be sure that each rating value is clearly tied to, or associated with, a specific level of the behavior/competency you’re reviewing. For instance, you could employ a Likert scale—a widely recognized and accepted way of fairly evaluating sentiment and other performance measures. To ensure objectivity, the interview questions should be consistent, objective, and measurable. Listen for indications of whether the candidate understands the value and an example of when they behaved accordingly. 

Here’s an example of a rating scale:

Personalize the self-assessment. 

Self-assessments give employees an opportunity to engage in self-reflection, which can provide insight into their strengths and growth areas. Asking employees to complete a self-reflection can also enhance how they feel about the review process, which can lead to more meaningful development conversations through constructive dialogue.

2. Writing the review

Focus on behaviors and competencies, not personality.

Reviews should emphasize observable behaviors, results, and skills, not personal traits or subjective interpretations of character. Instead of making blanket statements on what the employee is like, provide examples of behaviors you have observed and explain how effective or ineffective those behaviors were.

Be specific with open-ended responses.

Both managers and employees should be as specific as possible and use concrete examples throughout their reviews. Feedback that references specific behaviors is far more actionable than vague or general comments. For example, describing an example where an employee continuously kept stakeholders informed on a project is more informative for future behavior than simply stating the employee is a good communicator. 

Focus on growth and improvement.

Reviews should be future-focused and emphasize the employee’s ability and opportunity to grow and advance, even when they aren’t doing well. Language that emphasizes growth and learning will lead to higher engagement and motivation.

Tie feedback to development. 

The review should serve as a basis for creating or updating an employee’s development plan. You should use the review to cover progress toward previously set goals, and also to identify next steps. Ensure you tie feedback to future goals so the employee can continue progressing.

3. Compiling the review

Calibrate based on other feedback.

Before presenting feedback to the employee, managers may want to use our software to identify and compile key themes. They may also consider checking how their feedback stacks up to other inputs, such as informal peer reviews, recognition, or feedback, to help ensure consistency and fairness.

Check for bias.

While compiling feedback, managers should be aware of common biases, such as the halo effect (i.e., the inclination to review someone more positively based on liking them) or recency bias (i.e., the tendency to overemphasize more recent experiences), to maintain fairness. Written reviews might become skewed if these biases are present and left unaddressed. 

Account for context.

Reviews should account for and be framed within important contextual factors, such as changes in role expectations, business directions, or unique challenges the employee may have faced. Managers can acknowledge these factors and identify what was or was not in the employee’s control. These kinds of contextual factors can have considerable effects on an employee’s performance, so accounting for them when compiling feedback will help advocate for fairness and encourage employees to embrace the feedback.

Time for the review!

Once you’ve followed these important best practices, it’s time to conduct the actual review conversation. Visit this resource for tips on how to prepare for and guide the conversation.