Giving your employees regular feedback and a performance review is crucial to any proper performance review program. It helps to keep employees proactive, engaged, and motivated. Besides, getting reviews is ideal for collecting feedback and helping you on setting realistic project goals.

Performance reviews are a way to show your employees you are paying attention to their development and will help them to understand the places they need to improve, giving them the tools to do so.

In this article, you will learn how to use an employee review template to check employees' performance in your business, their different types of performance reviews, and how to make one of your own (with the help of some performance review templates as well).

There are several sections to include a wide array of information regarding the performance review of an employee, which will include:

• Basic Information: For analysis and demographics, you need to include the employee's name, ID, position, department, reviewer's name, and reviewer's title.
• Review Period: To track an employee's professional growth, it is crucial to include a review period (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual) on the performance review template as well as when it took place. 
• Rating System: The most important part is that the employee needs to understand each rating point. It has to be a sufficient explanation to ensure they understand it.
• Evaluation Items: What particular skills or aspects of the job are you evaluating.
• Goals: Employees need to know what will be the next expected set of goals. It will allow them to see the performance review rating they need to accomplish.
• Comments Field: Here, you can get extra employee feedback. It is a useful way to glean honest comments and allow the employee to showcase achievements or discuss some aspects of the job they found challenging. It is a great way to close an effective review process.
• Signatures: The employer and the employee need to sign and acknowledge that everything went as agreed.

It is a simple performance review template, which in the long-term, putting together would be very useful when collated over a set timeframe. 

Weekly performance review templates don't need to collect a huge amount of data each time and don't need to be goal-oriented. They are mostly useful for record-keeping and making sure the project stays on track weekly. 

They are particularly useful and good for fast-moving projects.

Monthly Performance Review

A monthly performance review is particularly useful for businesses that employ freelancers or people on short-term contracts. They used to have a probationary period for new hires, where the review could be part of the onboarding process.

New projects would also benefit from a monthly check-in to keep the employees on track, ensuring that each team member has all the resources and skills required and trying to avoid any early catastrophe on the project. 

Most employees prefer to have monthly check-ins with a regular cadence of progress reports rather than getting a single annual performance review for the whole year.  

Quarterly Performance Review

Some companies tend to divide their business into four different quarters throughout the year (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4). 

Each quarter will have its goals and targets to attend, alongside a specific budget to work on. So it makes sense that these sorts of businesses employ quarterly performance reviews.

Three months should be sufficient for an employee to get stuck in and achieve goals, targets and develop and learn. Let's say that is enough time to gather proper feedback for them.

You can use a quarterly review alongside weekly and monthly performance reviews to create an extensive report and organize your next employee review meeting.

Annual Performance Review

Annual performance reviews are being replaced or augmented, working together with the other alternatives. 

This performance review simply has too much information to handle well, and a year is far too long for employees to get actionable feedback about their performance expectations.

But doing reports throughout the year collated with a 12-month overall performance review would be useful as a bank of information, providing that the feedback has had actions attached to it.

If you need a CD key for both Word and Excel, you can purchase one at a low price in the RoyalCDKeys store. You can get the latest version of the Office package, which includes Word and Excel, together with many other programs such as Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, and many more.

Employee Performance Review Template

With this template, you will be able to create an evidence-based approach to evaluate employee competencies and job behaviors. 

Then, you will able to approach the employee and talk about their past performance and have an honest discussion using your direct reports.

You can download it as a Word document from Forbes.

Annual Performance Review Template

This annual performance review template focus on assessing management competencies. You will be able to list as many competencies as required to evaluate job performance and use the rating system and comments section to provide constructive feedback.

Download this template as an Excel spreadsheet from Smartsheet.

Employee Performance Review Spreadsheet Template

You can use this template to review if managers have already checked on some employees and discussed their performance with them, alongside a summary of how everything went with them.

Download it for Excel from Monday.

Employee Performance Evaluation Template

This detailed template allows supervisors to check on more personal aspects about a particular employee, like their relationship with their teammates and how effective it is at their job. It comes with a comments section for both parties as well.

Download it as a Word file from the CNM Community College.

Employee Evaluation Form

This template is more straightforward than previous performance review templates. But it can be further expanded as all the competencies come with a comments section if you wish to have a more thorough review.

Download it as a Word document from HR360.

Self-Evaluation Form Template

With this self-evaluation template, you could take advantage of peer review from your employees and check how they see their work. 

Then, you will be able to analyze if they were honest with their answers or how they see themselves at work. It will lead to more employee engagement.

Download it as an Excel file from WPS.

Contractor Performance Review Template

Just like you would want to check on an employee's performance, you may want detailed feedback from a contractor if your business employs them. 

It comes with specific competencies to check on your contractors and provides comment sections for both parties if you want to discuss it further.

Download it as a Word document from Template.Net.