Performance Review Process Template

The US Office of Personnel Management describes performance management as a cycle of five processes: planning, monitoring, developing, rating and rewarding¹. The review process is the rating step. Plan it on one page and share the plan with managers before reviews open.

Set the scope with a rule, such as everyone except people hired in the last 90 days, who get a check-in instead. Count the writing window in working days, allow for holidays, and add a midpoint check while there's still time to act.

Assign decisions, not tasks. Managers own each rating and its evidence. Whoever runs the cycle owns the scope, dates and checks, and rates nobody. Name who signs off final ratings, and two people who can settle a disagreement.

People should be rated against the goals they actually had. US federal rules, for example, require agencies to give employees performance plans at the beginning of each appraisal period, normally within 30 days². Goals change mid-year when a roadmap shifts, and retired ones can sit in the system looking current.

So record each goal's owner, its start date and, where it applies, the date it was retired. Lock that list the morning reviews open, and have each form show only the goals in force for that person. Don't reword vague goals now, because a vague goal that was in force is what the person worked toward. Write sharper ones for next period with an OKR template for teams.

Decide what each rating means before anyone writes a review. Shelley Correll, a Stanford professor, and Caroline Simard advise managers to outline the specific criteria before evaluations begin and use the same criteria for everyone at a level³. Every form then shares one layout: goals in force, a rating for each, an evidence box and a line on next period.

Evidence passes if it names one checkable thing. That can be a date, a document someone could find, a figure with what it measures, or a person outside the team who relied on the work.

Requiring evidence also guards against the rater's own habits. When Deloitte rebuilt its review process, it concluded that rater quirks produced ratings that revealed more about team leaders than about the people they were rating⁴.

Alongside the form, give managers a short writing guide that teaches four rewrites. A trait becomes an event, and a bare score becomes what produced it. "No concerns" becomes something the person did, and "best on the team" becomes a result others relied on. Vagueness isn't neutral. Correll and Simard found vague feedback was correlated with lower performance review ratings for women, but not for men³.

For a first draft, the performance review writer works only from a manager's records and flags vague claims.

Read each review the day it arrives, while there's still time to fix it. Check only the evidence behind ratings away from the middle. If it names nothing checkable, return it: quote the sentence, say what kind of evidence is missing and ask for one. Never say the rating looks high or low, or your note becomes a rating instruction.

Don't judge the cycle by early ratings. Reviews that are easy to write, usually the positive ones, tend to arrive first, so early numbers can run high. For a fairer forecast, assume each manager's missing reviews follow their own pattern from last cycle.

Calibration is the meeting where managers compare proposed ratings across teams before they are final. Its job is consistency, which the EEOC describes as making sure comparable job performances receive comparable ratings regardless of the evaluator⁵.

Going name by name is slow. Deloitte found that forms, meetings and ratings for its 65,000-plus people took close to 2 million hours a year⁴. Many of those hours went on leaders discussing the results behind closed doors.

Send the room a short list instead: ratings whose evidence still names nothing checkable, moves of two levels or more since last cycle, and ratings that contradict something on file. Approve everything else in one recorded decision, with a named signer and a date. Keep forecasts and target shapes out of the room, since a group shown a distribution first has been told where to land.

Keep each rating separate from what follows it, such as a raise. Writing for Gallup, Robert Sutton and Ben Wigert suggest holding the pay conversation and the performance review conversation in separate meetings⁶. They also suggest considering separate processes for promotions and for performance improvement plans.

Record each conversation's date and the employee's acknowledgment. Keep disagreement in its own field, since acknowledging a rating is not agreeing with it.

In the US, an EEOC rule covers personnel records, including pay and promotion records. Covered employers must keep them for one year from the date the record was made or the personnel action, whichever is later⁷. If reviews close July 17 and raises start September 1, keep them until at least September 1 next year.

A discrimination charge extends the hold: keep the relevant records until the charge, and any lawsuit over it, is finally resolved.

The template on this page sets out the whole cycle for a sample company. With Edit with AI, River locks your goal list, forecasts the close and checks each review you send.