To save you time and resources, we’ve created an easy-to-adapt employee review template for your small business. And we’ve also provided you with lots of team evaluation tips.
While a staff performance review is essential if you want your team to improve and your business to grow, it can also be awkward. As a result, some employers treat performance reviews as a necessary evil and carry them out almost as an afterthought.
But this is a wasted opportunity! A good employee review will help you identify opportunities and areas of development. And once your employees are motivated to achieve the right goals, your business will thrive. If you support your employees to grow and learn, they’re much more likely to do good work—which, as a bonus, improves employee retention.
It’s not easy to carry out an employee review for the first time. And you’ll need to use some specific techniques to make sure you’re aligned with your employees.
The following guide provides tips, examples, and templates, so you and your employees get the most out of an employee review. Some of the topics include:
- What is a performance review?
- Why are employee reviews important?
- How to carry out a successful employee review
- Remote employee reviews: Key criteria
💥 Do you need the employee review template right now? 💥
We’ve done the hard bit—all you need to do is use the template to carry out your own professional employee review.
What is a performance review?
A performance review is a formal assessment of an employee’s work, usually carried out by a manager. You should carry out a face-to-face employee review at least once a year.
However, it’s important to consider how much workplaces have changed, with many companies allowing employees to work from anywhere. This means that many performance reviews now take place via video call.
RingCentral makes this simple. RingEX is a unified communications platform with built-in messaging, video calling, the option to switch devices during the call, and plenty more besides. You can’t risk a disrupted conversation during a performance review—so it’s essential that you have all the options you need.
How to evaluate employee performance in a review
Effective employee reviews help you judge performance in a wide range of ways.Here are some of the matters you might typically cover as part of an employee review.
- Constructive feedback
You will offer constructive feedback to the employee, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and explain to them how they can improve.
- Comparisons
You will consider your employee’s performance and highlight how they’ve improved, and where there’s still room for improvement.
- Performance goals
You’ll provide the employee with some attainable goals. You can discuss how well the employee has met those goals during their next performance review.
- Self-evaluation
You may want to offer the employee the opportunity to write a self-assessment before the employment review. This will give them the opportunity to discuss how they see their role and analyze their own performance.
- Employee feedback
You can refer to employee feedback to help you improve your performance management skills and take a more objective view of company culture.
Annual employee performance reviews keep your team motivated and boost employee morale.
However, a yearly employee performance evaluation should be your bare minimum. As an employer, you should definitely consider more frequent check-ins with your employees so you can offer regular feedback. Along with annual performance reviews, monthly or weekly employee contact can massively improve employee performance and well-being.
Why are employee reviews important?
Performance reviews are important for a number of reasons, including the following:
1. Increased employee engagement
Naturally, when you give your employee positive feedback, they become more engaged with their work and are keen to continue to impress. Similarly, if you run any kind of reward schemes, they provide useful incentives to your employees.
Work isn’t just about earning a wage. If your employees are recognized for their good work, it will motivate them to work even harder.
2. They resolve issues
An employee review can help you resolve issues your employee may be experiencing, such as a communication issue with another team member, or confusion about their role.
If somebody is unhappy about a job-related issue, an employee review gives them the opportunity to talk about it.
💡 Pro-tip:
Don’t wait for an annual employee review to address issues. By carrying out monthly or weekly employee reviews, you can prevent or resolve issues long before they become a serious problem.
3. They help your business grow
Your business needs dedicated, hard-working employees to ensure its success. Regular employee reviews can help to improve employee engagement and resolve issues quickly, which, in turn, means they help your business grow.
Performance reviews for employees also give them the opportunity to suggest improvements to your business. Who better to listen to than those with firsthand experience? So you can capitalize on potentially indispensable ideas from your team, make this a standard part of your employee review.
For example, your employee might let you know about difficulties they’ve encountered working from home.. You can then resolve the issue and improve how your business functions.
You might want to introduce new tools, like the RingCentral app. The app includes team messaging, video meetings, and a built-in business phone system, and is designed to help your employees wherever they work.
How to carry out a successful employee review
Reviewing an employee’s work can be a challenge. If an employee works from home it adds another layer of complexity to your assessment. The assessment you currently use may no longer be fit for purpose.
However, you can still carry out an employee review for employees working from home. Consider the following tips on how to give a performance review to get the best results:
1. Start with the positives
The first rule you should follow when you offer feedback to your employees is: Start with the positives. Nobody wants to hear about their faults, certainly not before they hear the good news. Unless you want your employees to shut down or become defensive, start by addressing the things they’ve done well. This way, they’ll be much more likely to want to address the things they need to improve.
Here’s an example:
“Emily regularly receives four-star reviews from her clients. She forms positive relationships and works well under pressure. If Emily could focus a little more on her time management skills and keep a closer eye on the length of video meetings to ensure that clients aren’t waiting too long, before long her client reviews will hit five stars.”
Here, Emily’s manager focuses first on her strengths: her relationships with her clients and her ability to work under pressure. Only then does Emily’s manager mention her poor time management skills. If Emily’s manager had chosen to initially focus on the negatives, she may have become defensive and have been less willing to make the necessary improvements.
2. Use valid evidence
You should always use valid, substantial evidence when you carry out an employee review. If you don’t back up criticism with valid evidence, your employees could have good reason to complain to your human resources department.
Compare the following two employee review examples:
“Mike needs to focus more during working hours as he is often disengaged and takes too long to complete tasks.”
“Mike is not active in team messaging channels and takes 3–4 hours to respond. Since January, he has completed 5–6 cases a day, around half his target of 12 cases a day.”
The first statement contains no valid evidence and uses only generalizations. The second statement uses valid, measurable data to analyze the employee’s performance.
Using measurable data when you carry out an employee review is especially important for employees who work from home. Many managers use call recording software, not only to train new starters, but to also look closely at how their employees perform. If you do this, you can then refer to the results during an employee’s performance review.
At RingCentral, we offer automatic call recording which allows you to download and review up to 100,000 recordings per account.. Automatic call recording allows you to make sure your employees are following your guidelines and properly handling calls.
Here’s some other data you could measure to include as part of an employee review:
- Number of sales
- Number of errors
- Email and direct message response time
- Net Promoter Score or client satisfaction ratings
- Number of units produced
- Call handling time
3. Use an employee review template as a guideline, not a script
You should never carry out an employee review as though each employee is the same, relying on the review template to do all the work. Your conversation with your employee will be stilted, and you may only draw a limited response.
That said, an employee review template is a very important tool to help you cover all the right areas and make sure you don’t miss anything.
Our employee review template is both competency based AND includes specific criteria for remote workers and hybrid teams.
4. Offer solutions to problems
Your employee doesn’t want to hear what they’re doing wrong without also being told how to improve.
As part of your employee review, you should always offer solutions to issues.. Here’s an example:
“Kishan sometimes struggles to speak up during video meetings. They should try to make three meaningful contributions during each meeting and take part in our confidence-building courses on the workplace hub.”
The manager has picked out Kishan’s weakness and has shown how they can improve.
Communicating on video calls can be tricky, and Kishan’s struggles are fairly common. RingCentral Video can give your team the resources you need to host, join, and manage seamless meetings. This means your employees can focus on their own contribution without needing to worry about bad call quality or distracting background noise.
5. Follow up your employee review
You should follow up every employee review by checking in with your employee to see if amended targets have been met. Ideally, you should wait 30 days after the initial review to give the employee enough time to focus on targets and work towards improving their performance.
If you don’t follow up on employee reviews in this way, your employee may become complacent. They may feel you’re not too worried about how quickly they meet their performance goals. Following up on an employee review shows how much you want your employees to improve.
Reviewing remote employees: Important criteria to include
As you may already know, employee reviews for home-based staff can be a challenge, and it can be hard to express ourselves or set goals through a screen. Plus, you may struggle to measure the performance of an employee you haven’t seen face-to-face in months.
Here are some of the things you should consider when you carry out a home-working employee review.
- Online communication habits
Good remote work demands good communication. If your employee regularly checks their emails, responds quickly during online conversations, and is always ready to jump on a call, they have the right attitude.
- Self-motivation and discipline
An employee working from home needs to remain motivated and work hard without a manager nearby. It’s easy to measure this by setting goals and monitoring progress toward those goals during the given timeframe. If a remote employee can hit—or even exceed—these goals, you have nothing to worry about.
- Online presence and participation
How active is your employee in team messaging, and do they regularly contribute to virtual meetings? Think about what kind of online presence and participation you want from your employee and set and measure relevant targets.
- Client reviews
Although remote working is very different to working in an office, clients still expect the same great service. In this case, you can easily measure your employee’s performance by checking their client reviews.
Remote employee performance reviews will naturally feel very different to traditional office-based ones. Instead of sitting in a meeting room, you’ll both be on a video call and will need to make sure you have a good connection and a quiet remote location.
You’ll need to use screen sharing so you’re both focused on the same visual onscreen content. And, you’ll need to make sure that all employee review forms are completed and returned to you via email or other digital means.
Build your own employee review template today
With the right employee review system, your staff will be happier and perform better, and you’ll get better results from your business.. When employees can see that you not only want them to work hard and learn new skills, but also be happy in the workplace, they will work harder and enjoy what they do even more.
Your employee review doesn’t have to be a burden. Get it right, and you’ll reap the rewards. With our easy-to-adapt employee performance review template, you’ll soon be carrying out better, more effective employee performance reviews.
Employee review FAQs
What are some different types of performance evaluation?
Businesses typically carry out different types of performance review, from weekly check-ins to a more formal annual appraisal. The more regular reviews will often just be quick chats between a superior and their employee. Quarterly or annual performance evaluations are more likely to need an employee review template and may involve senior management.
What are some examples of employee reviews done well?
The following is an example of an effective employee review:
“Kate consistently achieves CSAT scores of over 80%. When customers do have complaints, however, they tend to say she leaves them on hold for too long. If Kate can find a way to resolve issues without placing callers on hold for so long, her CSAT scores will likely rise even higher.”
This is a good review as it opens with a strength, backs up claims with data, and includes a suggestion as to how to remedy an identified weakness.
Originally published Jul 20, 2024, updated Jul 29, 2024
