How you structure performance review questions will have a significant impact on your next review cycle and the data you collect.
Get the bookPerformance reviews help companies collect data about employee performance. A successful review cycle will identify the top performers, the problem children, the good managers, the bad managers, the up and coming super stars, the underachievers, and more. If done correctly, the review cycle will highlight each employee’s strengths and weaknesses, while also providing some interesting trends around the overall company performance.
The data collected from the review will impact key business decisions over the next few quarters; employees will be promoted, fired, and placed in managerial roles based off this data. And just like any good data collection process, it starts by being thoughtful around the questions that you’re asking to make sure that you’re collecting the right data. This means thinking critically about the objective of the review, the overall structure and the particular questions that you’re asking participants.
Before running a review cycle, start by asking yourself the following questions:
There's two common objectives for performance reviews. Yours can include one or both
The objective is to assess the employee’s performance over a certain period of time to make key business decisions. Typically, these decisions include things like whether this person should get promoted, whether the employee deserves a raise, and the employee’s overall status within the company. These types of reviews are for the company to gather important information about the employee and typically happen 1-2 times per year.
The objective is to provide employees with feedback to highlight how they can improve. At the end of this review, employees know what they need to work on and what steps they need to take to be successful. These types of reviews are for the employee’s benefit, and ideally happen 2-4 times per year.
Depending on your objective, decide who should be participating in this cycle.
An employee reflects on how they’ve performed, and shares what they want to accomplish at the company and their broader career.
Colleagues highlight the strengths and weakness of an employee’s performance over a certain period of time.
Direct reports analyze how their boss is performing both for the business and for the direct report’s career.
Before drafting review questions, start by selecting the broader category of employee qualities that you want to measure. There’s a number of different aspects of an employee’s work life that you can collect data around, for example:
How well does an employee manage other people and motivate a group of individuals.
How does this person approach completing their work product.
How well does this person reflect the company values.
What can this person do to improve their work product and interactions at the company.
How much of a contribution does this person make to the organization.
How does this person approach challenges.
How well does this person interact with co-workers.
The exact mix of employee qualities that are featured in a review is dependent on what an organization identifies as an important input into their decision making process.
There’s two ways to frame performance review questions:
Most review questions feature a Likert Scale that measures the attitudes and behaviors using answer choices that range from one extreme to another. Unlike a simple yes / no question, a Likert scale allows you to uncover degrees of opinion.
While it may sound counterintuitive, it’s totally okay to have two different objectives and review styles in your review. For some review periods (i.e. annual reviews), you may want to gather information that will both help the employee (development) and the company (evaluation), and that’s fine! As long as you’re thinking critically about the structure of the review and know what information you want to gather ahead of time, you’re on the right track.
Designed to give employees feedback so they can continually get better throughout the year.
A quick way to provide feedback on your co-workers every few months.
Great for an end of year review.
An easy framework for employees to provide simple feedback. Perfect for companies that hold performance reviews more frequently.
Simple way to look at the three critical dimensions of performance.
Designed to evaluate performance and provide developmental feedback.
For an employee to evaluate their own performance.
For employees to evaluate their colleague’s performance
Designed to evaluate performance and provide developmental feedback.
For a manager to evaluate their direct report’s performance.
For an employee to evaluate their manager’s performance.
The survey itself is short. It's roughly a dozen statements with a Likert scale measuring if Googlers agree or disagree with the statements. Each statement is based on one of the eight behaviors of successful managers at Google.
The Manager Feedback Survey also asks for confidential comments from Googlers:
At the end of every project, or once a quarter if employees have long-term assignments, managers ask four questions that are rated on a five-point scale, from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree;" the second two have yes or no options:
Questions for your next performance review organized by category.
