What form should I use for employee reviews?
Pam Fox Rollin
![Pam Fox Rollin]()
Pam Fox Rollin
Guiding top teams in healthcare and tech to build strategies and cultures where leaders and teams succeed and thrive (she/her)
Got this question today from an MBA classmate of mine. She was kicking around the net and came up with a fistful of forms (one 18 pages long!).
Here's how I answered her, and I'm posting here in case useful to you:
I absolutely lean toward shorter and customized to company and role. My favorite reviews are organized in 3 categories:
1. Performance on the top 3 key responsibility areas of the role
2. Contribution to 1-3 other major factors/initiatives that matter to the whole team or the company
3. Demonstrating the Company values, if any, have been articulated (comments here can be shorter, usually, unless there's a major issue)
For each of these areas,
A. What were the expectations? [6 months ago you did set expectations together, right?]
B. How is this person doing relative to those expectations?
C. Going forward, how are those expectations changing? (e.g. to reflect changing company priorities, team needs, the person's growth, potential next roles)
D. Given the person's performance and any changes in expectations, what should the person keep doing and what should they do differently?
In closing:
- What are our top few expectations of you for the cycle ahead?
- How we can partner to help you meet/exceed/blow the roof off them?
For a traditionally-organized company, even here in Silicon Valley, this style of review tends to tee up the most useful performance conversations... which is, really, the whole point.
Note that for fast-growth and flatter companies, I see other great ways to keep people focused on the right things: OKRs, live round-table feedback, paired peer feedback, etc. (Topic for a future post, if there's interest.)
Customer Focused🔹️Systems Thinker🔹️EQ🔹️Servant & Clinical Leader🔹️Quality Care🔹️Registered Nurse🔹️Medical Freedom🔹️Process/Quality Improvement🔹️Change Mgmt🔹️Strategist🔹️Teams🔹️Skeptic🔹️Perfectly Imperfect
6yBeyond "what form should be used" is a topic of interest to me that is, "are the prevailing 'formal performance appraisal' policies" beneficial to the growth and development of an organization? From a systems thinking perspective, while the process may fit well from a "fair labor law" compliance and risk mitigation perspective, the prevailing "formal" approach seems to open the door to souring individual contributor's zeal and appreciation for their work which then negatively impacts their performance. Is there a better way to institute necessary performance feedback? For those of you reading this, do you have any perspectives that you are willing and able to share? Thanks in advance!