Setting up performance templates for employee reviews

Setting up performance templates for employee reviews helps HR Admins streamline evaluations and provide consistent feedback. These templates create a standardized framework for assessing key competencies and tracking goals, ensuring reviews are aligned with your organization's goals, values, and specific evaluation criteria. This guide outlines the steps HR admins can take to create and configure performance review templates efficiently.

Templates for performance reviews can include sections and questions to be completed during performance reviews. To get started, navigate to the Employee management section in Settings as an HR Admin and select Performance templates.

 

Creating performance review templates

Here you can create the "master" templates that will be assigned to your review cycles. When setting up a review cycle you can require managers to customize them for their direct reports if desired.

 

Default templates

In the Performance templates section, you'll find two default templates that have been set up for:

• A Self-review: Employees write a review about their own performance.
• A Manager review: Managers write a review about their direct reports' performance.

You can use these as a starting point and easily modify them to fit your needs (click on the three-dot menu to edit). Below, you'll find the content for each of the templates:

Self-review (Default template)

Manager review (Default template)

New templates

You can also create your performance review templates from scratch by clicking Add template on the upper right and following the below steps:

1. Fill out the template name, for example, "Annual Manager review", "Annual self-review" etc
2. Fill in the template; you can include multiple sections in a template and multiple questions in a section. 
3. Click the up and down arrows to move sections/questions up or down. If you don't need a section/question, click the trashcan icon to remove it completely from the template.
4. Once ready, click Save on the upper right.

You’ll find all your performance templates listed, along with the number of sections and questions each contains.

 

Managing performance review templates

Use the search bar to search for a specific template. The following actions can be taken for a template once you click the three dot menu.

Edit a template

You can modify a review template to update its name or content. If you try to edit a review template currently used in active performance review cycles, you will be notified and prompted to confirm that you wish to proceed with editing.

If you proceed with editing this template, any changes you save will not affect the employees participating in those review cycles.

Delete a template

Deleting a review template will permanently remove it from your template list, and you won't be able to restore it. Reviews using this template will not be affected.

Deleted review templates cannot be selected for newly created review cycles.

Preview a template

Take a moment to preview the template and see how it will look for your employees/managers when they begin filling it out. Note that the template will be in read-only view, so any changes you make won't be saved.

 

FAQs

Can I assign a review template to a specific employment type, entity, location, or department?

You can set this up while creating or editing a review cycle.

• In Step 2, you'll choose which template(s) to use for this review.
• In step 3, you can select which types of employees (Full-Time, Part-Time, Contractor) and/or which entities, locations, and departments of employees to include in this review cycle. In the example below, we've included only Contractors for our US entity.