How to write a performance review

Almost every complaint about performance reviews comes down to one thing: the review contained no evidence. "Great team player, could improve communication" tells the person nothing they can act on, and it tells a promotion panel nothing at all.

The fix is unglamorous. Write from a record, not from memory of the last six weeks.

Writing a review of someone else

Gather evidence first. Go back through the period — projects delivered, deadlines met and missed, the things you noticed at the time. Recency bias is the dominant distortion in appraisals: without notes you will write a review of the last month.

Anchor to the objectives that were actually set. If they were vague, say so and take your share of that; do not judge someone against a standard they were never given.

For each point, use the same shape: the situation, what they did, what resulted. "When the supplier pulled out three weeks before launch, Kemi renegotiated with two alternatives inside a week and we shipped on time." That sentence does more than a paragraph of adjectives.

Be specific about development too. Not "needs to improve communication" — that is the single most common and least useful sentence in the genre. Which communication, with whom, in what situation, and what would better look like? "Written updates to the client have sometimes gone out without a clear ask, which has caused delays. I'd like to see every update end with a specific question or next step."

Separate the person from the circumstances. A target missed because the market moved is not the same as a target missed through poor planning, and conflating them destroys trust in the whole document.

Nothing should be a surprise. If a serious problem appears for the first time in an annual review, the management failure is yours. Raise it when it happens.

Structure

• Summary judgement, stated plainly at the top
• Performance against each objective, with evidence
• Strengths, with examples
• Development areas, with specifics and suggested support
• Objectives for the next period
• Anything the organisation should do differently

Writing your own self-assessment

Most people are bad at this in one of two directions, and both cost them.

Be concrete, not modest. "Supported the migration project" is invisible. "Led the data-mapping workstream for the migration, covering 40,000 records, delivered two weeks early" is a fact, and facts are not boasting. If your cultural instinct is to understate, remember that the reader is comparing your document with those of people who will not understate.

Quantify where you honestly can. Numbers, timescales, scope, people involved.

Name what you did, not what the team did. "We" is generous and it makes you disappear.

Include a real development area. A self-assessment with no weaknesses reads as either dishonest or incurious, and it wastes the one chance you have to ask for training or a different kind of work.

Ask for something specific. The review is often the only formal moment to request scope, support or progression. Vague ambition gets vague answers.

Tone and language

Behaviour, not character. "Missed three of five deadlines in Q2" is reviewable; "unreliable" is a judgement about a person and is much harder to defend.

Avoid coded language. Research on appraisals consistently finds that women and minority-ethnic staff receive more personality feedback and less task feedback than colleagues doing the same work. Reread your draft and ask, for each sentence, whether it describes what someone did or what they are like. Keep the first kind.

Common mistakes

No evidence. Recency bias. Feedback the person is hearing for the first time. "Needs to improve communication." Copying last year's review. Inflating everyone, which makes the whole exercise meaningless and hurts the people who genuinely excelled. Writing it the night before. Setting objectives that cannot be measured.

Practical tips

• Keep a running note through the year — one line whenever something notable happens. Ten minutes a month removes almost all the pain of this.
• Draft it, leave it a day, then remove every adjective that has no example attached.
• Ask the person for their self-assessment before you write yours of them, and read it properly.
• For your own: write it as though someone who has never met you must decide your promotion from this document alone.