An employee review template is a form with the right boxes in the right order, and most of the ones a small company downloads have the wrong boxes in the wrong order: a page of competencies rated one to five with no objectives anywhere, and a comments box at the bottom that the manager fills in last. A simple performance review template starts from the objectives set at the beginning of the period, because that is what the employee and the manager agreed the work was, and every other box follows from them. This page walks the template for employee performance review box by box, explains why the short one is the better one, and shows how the performance review form and the performance review document become one record per employee per cycle rather than a file per year.
The boxes, in order
The period and the names. The objectives set at the start, each with its target and measure, carried in from last time. Against each objective: the employee's self-appraisal and self-rating, then the manager's rating and comment. An overall rating on the company's scale, with the scale's definitions printed beside it. The manager's final comments. The outcome: the merit increase or none, the development plan, the objectives for the next period. Signatures and dates. That is the whole performance review form, and a template with more boxes than that is asking for opinions the cycle does not use.
Why the short template wins
Because the objectives are the structure, a template does not need a competency grid to make the review thorough; it needs the objectives to have been written properly at the start. A grid of twenty competencies rated by feel produces twenty numbers that mean nothing across managers and cannot be calibrated. Five objectives with targets, each rated with a comment, produce five defensible judgements and an overall rating a calibration meeting can compare. The free final comments worksheet on this site is the manager's half of that short template, turning the rating and the objectives met into an outcome and a new salary with example comments beside the figures.
From form to record
Performance review templates are filled once a year and filed; the performance review document that results is one file per employee per year in a folder. The record is the same fields kept per employee per cycle in one place, so this year's form shows last year's objectives, rating and outcome beside it. That is what lets a manager write against history, lets a calibration meeting see distributions by manager, and lets the merit increase reach payroll as an export rather than a retyped number. Reviewvo Pro keeps the template's fields as that record, per employee per cycle, and exports them.
Questions people ask about employee review template
What should an employee review template include?
The period, the objectives set at the start with targets, the employee's self-appraisal and self-rating per objective, the manager's rating and comment per objective, an overall rating with the scale defined, final comments, the outcome and next period's objectives.
Should a performance review form rate competencies?
Not as the structure. Objectives with targets produce judgements that can be defended and calibrated; a grid of competencies rated by feel produces numbers that mean different things in every team.
Where should completed performance review documents be kept?
On a record per employee per cycle, in one place, so each new review is written beside the last one and the outcome can be exported. A folder of yearly files is where history goes to be forgotten.