If you've always associated review forms with endless lists of questions – don't worry, that's not where we're going. What we're building here is two focused forms: one for the employee, one for the manager. By the end of this module, you'll also know how to adapt them to your organisation.

A review form shouldn't make the conversation harder. Its job is to help structure it and bring two perspectives into the same frame: the employee's and the manager's.

That's why a form is always the consequence of decisions you've already made – not the starting point.

The review system as foundation

If you've worked through the earlier modules and put those foundations in place, you've already done the hardest part.

As we've said throughout this Academy: performance reviews aren't about one meeting or one form. They're about how the company operates day to day – how you set goals, how you give feedback, whether roles and responsibilities are clear.

In practice, that means: do people know what's expected of them? Do managers respond in the moment? Are difficult topics addressed when they come up, or saved for the annual review meeting? Is good work recognised as it happens?

The system comes first. Without those foundations, even the best form quickly becomes a pointless formality.

Form structure – how to organise it

A form should support the conversation primarily by generating good, useful data. In the ideal version, its structure mirrors how a good review conversation actually flows – from facts to decisions. The form becomes a guide that moves the meeting forward step by step.

In Module 4, we broke the review conversation into four areas:

• Goals and results – what was actually delivered.
• Behaviours, values, and collaboration – how someone works day to day and how that affects others.
• The employee's perspective – how the employee experiences working with the company.
• Development and the future – what happens next.

Facts first, then how they were achieved, then decisions. That's an intuitive sequence, and your form should follow it.

Why consistency between the form and the conversation structure matters

When they match, conversations are simply easier. The manager knows the order to work through, and the employee knows what to expect.

It also means reviews run by different managers can be compared – because they're covering the same ground.

A clean structure saves time and makes preparation easier for everyone. The form should generate data and guide the conversation, not be one more thing to tick off.

Method – which one, and when

There's no single "ideal" review method. There are different approaches that work better at different stages of a company's development and with different organisational needs.

The main types in practice

• 90° review – a self-assessment in which the employee prepares for the conversation by summarising their period of work: goals, challenges, and takeaways. Works best as a preparation step before the actual review conversation. It also makes sense in mature teams or as a transitional approach when piloting the process. As a standalone method it rarely supports business decisions, because it only captures one perspective.
• 180° review – a combination of the employee's self-assessment and the manager's evaluation. Two perspectives meet: the employee brings their view of goals and challenges, the manager brings the team and company lens. This model works best for small and mid-sized companies, especially in growth phases when the CEO no longer has direct visibility into everything. It gives a solid basis for conversation and moves quickly from assessment to concrete decisions. For many companies, it's also the right starting point – simple, but complete enough to inform real business and personnel decisions.
• 270° review – adds the perspective of other teams or stakeholders to the employee and manager views. This allows you to see not just goal delivery but the real effect of how someone works on other parts of the organisation. Worth considering in larger or more structurally complex companies that already have some experience running reviews. It requires more time from managers, a more formalised process, and deliberate data collection and analysis.
• 360° review – the most comprehensive method. Feedback comes from multiple sources: the employee, their manager, peers, sometimes direct reports or clients. It can give a wide picture of how someone works and the impact they have. Makes most sense in larger organisations with significant experience running reviews and the capacity to act on what they find. In smaller companies or early in the process, the overhead usually outweighs the value. Rarely the right starting point.

A starting recommendation

If you're introducing reviews for the first time, build incrementally. Many small companies do well starting with a 90° review – a self-assessment treated as a calm preparation step for the first round of conversations. It lets teams get comfortable with the idea of reviews, practise reflecting on their work, and reduce the anxiety around the process before moving to the more decision-oriented 180° model.

Criteria – what's actually worth assessing

Once your conversation areas are defined, the next step is deciding what specifically within those areas you want to evaluate. That's what criteria are.

Criteria aren't universal. The same area will look different across different companies, and even across different departments within the same organisation. It depends on culture, current goals, and what matters most to the organisation right now.

Where to find the right criteria

You rarely need to invent them. They're usually already in the company – just not always named explicitly.

Look in these places:

• Company and team goals, and their key results.
• Daily working patterns – the behaviours the company reinforces or currently lacks most.
• The requirements of specific roles, because what matters for a manager differs from what matters for a specialist.
• Problems that keep recurring and genuinely block results.
• Conversations with managers, where the same expectations and frustrations come up again and again.

From area to criteria – an example

Take the behaviours and values area. Every organisation has its own set of attitudes that matter to it, and individual teams and roles may have additional needs based on the specific nature of their work.

The simplest approach is to ground criteria in your company values – if they're clearly defined and genuinely lived, they're an excellent starting point. Values describe how you expect people to work and behave; criteria translate that into everyday practice.

The reality is that many small companies don't have written values yet, or they exist more in the CEO's head than in actual operations. That's fine. You don't need to fix that before introducing reviews.

If you don't have named values, you can get to criteria a simpler way. Just look at how the company operates and ask: what attitudes does my company most need right now to work better and deliver on its goals?

For one company, that's proactivity – because without it, everything stalls and requires constant supervision. For another, it's cross-team collaboration – because silos and poor information flow are the main bottleneck. For a third, it's seeing things through to completion – because tasks drag and nothing fully closes.

The conversation area is the same in each case. The criteria differ because the actual needs differ.

How many criteria to choose

There's no universal number. It depends on the stage of the organisation, the complexity of roles, the maturity of managers, and what the review is trying to achieve.

More important than the count is whether your criteria meet three conditions: they should be relevant (connected to things that genuinely affect results and ways of working), clearly described (so everyone understands what each criterion actually means), and non-overlapping (each criterion covers distinct ground rather than repeating what another one already captures).

Too few criteria and the assessment stays superficial – the conversation drifts to generalities, and nobody leaves with a clear sense of what needs to change.

Many companies overcorrect and go the other way: long lists of criteria, complex forms. The effect is the opposite of helpful. Criteria start duplicating each other, buzzwords appear with no real business meaning, and the conversation becomes a slow march through checkboxes instead of a path to decisions.

The goal is a set of criteria that gives a clear picture and allows decisions to be made after the conversation – without unnecessary paperwork. A practical target for any single area: three to six criteria.

Form design – questions, scales, and descriptions

Once areas and criteria are defined, the next step is choosing how to evaluate them. This matters – not just for the company but for the people being reviewed. How you design the evaluation directly affects whether people know what to prepare for and what to expect from the conversation.

A well-designed form should feel fair and focused on things that genuinely matter.

Two categories of method

Relative methods

the evaluation is always made in comparison to other people, not against the criteria or role expectations themselves.

These include: ranking (ordering employees from "best" to "weakest"), paired comparison (comparing each person with every other), and forced distribution (dividing people into predefined groups such as top, middle, bottom).

These methods make sense in large organisations where results need to be differentiated across many employees and evaluation is directly tied to bonuses, budgets, or promotions. For small and mid-sized companies starting out, they're usually the wrong choice – they create unnecessary competition, are time-consuming, and shift attention away from the development conversation.

Absolute methods

the evaluation is made against specific criteria, not relative to others.

These include rating scales, descriptive evaluation, weighted scales, behavioural anchored rating scales (BARS), critical incident method, and management by objectives (MBO).

These are the methods more commonly recommended for small and mid-sized companies, because they keep the conversation grounded in facts, expectations, and decisions – not comparisons between people.

How to match method to criterion

Not every method suits every criterion. You talk about results differently than you talk about attitudes or collaboration or development. Rather than looking for "the best review method," match the evaluation approach to what you actually want to assess – and why.

Rating scales

One of the most widely used methods. Employee and manager each rate a criterion on a scale (say, 1 to 5), then discuss the result in the conversation.

Works well when you want to compare the employee's self-assessment with the manager's view, or when you're evaluating something relatively concrete – goal delivery, timeliness, quality of work.

The problem comes when the scale is "bare" – just numbers. Without context, it quickly becomes a gut-feel exercise, because everyone has a different sense of what "3" or "4" means. A simple fix is adding a short legend:

• 1 – Goal not achieved.
• 2 – Goal partially achieved, with significant gaps.
• 3 – Goal partially achieved, with minor gaps.
• 4 – Goal achieved as agreed.
• 5 – Goal exceeded, with real impact on the company.

For assessing attitudes, collaboration, or alignment with company values – areas that are less measurable and harder to reduce to numbers – a bare rating scale quickly runs out of road. That's where behavioural scales become useful.

Behavioural anchored rating scales (BARS)

BARS is a rating scale with brief descriptions of actual behaviours attached to each level. This takes the scale from abstract to concrete – each point refers to something that can actually be observed in real work.

For each level, you describe what that score means in terms of specific behaviours in your company. An example for the criterion "proactivity":

• 1 – Waits for instructions and decisions. Doesn't flag risks or problems. Acts mainly reactively, when prompted.
• 2 – Responds when asked. Raises problems only after they've already appeared. Rarely takes initiative.
• 3 – Takes initiative within their own area of responsibility. Owns their tasks and communicates risks as they arise.
• 4 – Works ahead. Makes things easier for others, proposes improvements, and takes ownership beyond the minimum scope of their role.
• 5 – Thinks systemically and anticipates the consequences of their actions. Initiates changes that genuinely improve how the team or company operates, and positively shapes how others work.

With BARS, the conversation isn't about whether someone is "good or weak." It's about whether and how often specific behaviours appear. In practice – particularly in small and mid-sized companies – combining a rating scale with behavioural descriptions gives you the best results. It reduces subjectivity, helps employees prepare for the conversation, and grounds the discussion in specifics rather than impressions.

Rating scales only work well when everyone knows what the numbers actually mean.

Descriptive evaluation

Descriptive evaluation uses open questions – the employee or manager describes the situation in their own words. Works well when you want reflection and context, when you want to understand the employee's perspective, or when the conversation is about development, collaboration, or the future.

Most commonly used for employee feedback to the company or team, and for summarising key takeaways from the period.

A few things to keep in mind: ask specific questions, limit how many you include, and treat the answers as a starting point for conversation – not a finished assessment.

In practice it works best as a complement to a rating scale, not the only method in the form. It brings the conversation down from general scores to concrete experiences.

Weighted scales

In a weighted scale, different criteria carry different weight – some matter more to the business than others and have a proportionally greater effect on the overall assessment. This makes sense when you know that not all areas are equally important and you want to signal clearly what matters most in a given period.

In practice, it's rarely the right choice at the start. Weighted scales add complexity quickly, require calculating scores, and easily shift attention from the conversation to the "final result." Worth treating as a later-stage option, once the review process is already running smoothly.

Critical incident method

The critical incident method bases the conversation on a small number of specific situations from the review period that had a real effect on results, collaboration, or how work got done.

Instead of general verdicts like "it was fine" or "there were issues," you return to specific events – what happened, what the effect was, and what conclusions to draw. Works well as a complement to other methods, and particularly useful when you want to avoid gut-feel evaluations and anchor the conversation in facts. Rarely works as the only method, but it strengthens most other approaches – especially rating scales and descriptive evaluation.

Management by objectives (MBO)

MBO grounds the entire review conversation in goals that were agreed at the start of the period. The employee isn't assessed "in general" – they're assessed against what was agreed. Works best when goals were clearly defined and understood, and when it's straightforward to determine whether a goal was met.

In practice, this isn't just about marking a status in the form. The conversation covers what the goal was, what was delivered, what blocked delivery, and what conclusions to carry into the next period. Applied well, MBO naturally leads to concrete post-conversation decisions.

To close

A form doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's the product of decisions already made and the health of the system around it. Without those foundations, even the best form loses its purpose quickly.

To make this easier to apply, sample forms – one for the employee and one for the manager – are included below as a starting point. Don't copy them wholesale. Treat them as a template and adapt to what your company actually needs. The goal is a form that helps the conversation serve your company's goals – not one more box to tick.