Regular performance reviews are an important way to stay aligned on goals and progress with each of your employees or team members. As a manager, you can review employee self-evaluations, complete your own assessment of each employee, and send reports to follow up on your in-person review meetings.
Preparing for performance reviews
Each review cycle gives you an opportunity to reflect on and discuss the impact each employee has made since the last review cycle. This process helps to identify gaps between your understanding of goals and expectations and your employees’ understanding, and to see if they worked toward those goals according to your company values.
Consider:
Which goals were achieved, or not achieved?
How did the employee go about their work, and how did they model your company's values?
To dig deeper into each employee’s progress, ask yourself things like:
What are the employee's key strengths, and are they using those strengths?
Do they understand my expectations?
Do I understand their interests and vision for growth?
Is there anything that I wish they would do — or do differently? Is something preventing me from giving them feedback about it?
What can they keep doing, or start doing, to make a bigger impact in the future?
Also, be sure to read through your employee's self-evaluation and any feedback they’ve received from their peers or direct reports before writing your review and discussing it with the employee.
How to select peer reviewers for your direct reports
If your review cycle includes peer reviews, your direct reports can select coworkers to provide input. As their manager, you can also add and remove people from their list of reviewers.
To add or remove peer reviewers for your employees:
Click Review in the left sidebar.
Check the review cycle near the top of the window. Click Switch Review Cycles if you need to see a different review than the one shown.
Click My Team, if shown, and find the correct name on the list of participants.
Click the More icon (ellipsis) next to the employee’s name and select Manage Reviewers.
To add a reviewer, search for an employee by name and click Add and Notify to add them to the list of reviewers.
To remove a reviewer from the list, click the Delete icon (trash can) next to their name.
Click Close when you’re finished.
Each reviewer will get an email letting them know they've been selected as a peer reviewer for your employee. Once they’ve submitted their review, you’ll see their responses in your direct report’s review report, or in the right sidebar while you’re working on the employee’s review.
How to complete your team’s reviews
You can access your direct reports’ reviews from the Reviews view.
Click Review in the left sidebar.
Check the review cycle near the top of the window. Click Switch Review Cycles if you need to complete a different review than the one shown.
Click My Team, if shown, to switch to the list of participants.
Find the correct employee on the list of Participants and click Review.
Add a response to each question on the review form.
Click Save as Draft to save your work and finish it later.
Click Submit to submit your review.
While you’re completing the review, you’ll be able to see the employee’s goals and feedback in the right sidebar. If they completed a self-assessment, you’ll be able to see their responses there as well.
When you submit your review, it will be marked complete but won’t be automatically shared with the employee. In order for the employee to see it in their reviews view, you’ll need to send it as a report.
Comment Generator
While you’re completing a review for a direct report, you’ll find the Comment Generator tool wherever you see rating scale questions. The generator lets you compose comments using standard statements so you don’t have to start from scratch.
To generate comments:
Click Comment Generator above the comment field.
Choose a performance category from the dropdown: Opportunities to Improve, Consistently Meets Expectations, Often Exceeds Expectations, or Almost Always Exceeds Expectations.
Check all the statements that apply to the employee.
Click Generate and the statements you chose will be added to the comment field.
Edit or format the comments to personalize them.
How to deliver review reports
Once your reviews are complete, you can deliver final reports to your employees. We recommend having an in-person conversation to discuss the review before finalizing it and sending the report.
Before sending the final report, you can check the status of employees’ self-evaluations and preview your final report from both the manager’s and direct report’s perspectives. You can opt to hide comments if there are remarks that shouldn’t be included in the final report.
To review and deliver performance reviews:
Click Review in the left sidebar.
Check the review cycle near the top of the window. Click Switch Review Cycles if you need to complete a different review than the one shown.
Click My Team, if shown, to switch to the list of participants.
Find the correct employee and click Finish Review.
Review your assessment a final time.
Click Question Breakdown, Overall Summary, or Summary by Category on the left-hand side to jump to different sections.
Click Hide Comment under any comments that shouldn’t be included.
Click Preview And Release to see the final version of the report that will be delivered to the employee.
When you’re ready to share the report, click Complete & Release.
Your employee will be notified that their review report is available to view.