15 Free Employee Performance Review Templates (Plus Tips)

Leila Cruz

Content Partnership Specialist

November 11, 2022

Max 11min read

Giving your employees a performance review and regular feedback is an essential part of any good performance review program.

Aside from helping keep employees engaged, motivated, and proactive, reviews are ideal for collecting actionable feedback and setting realistic project goals. It’s a way to show them that you’re paying attention and that you care about their development. Not to mention, it can help them understand where they need to improve and give them the tools they need to do so.

But we get it—the thought of conducting reviews for all your employees might feel a little overwhelming, but don’t worry; it’s not as hard as it seems. In fact, using a template can make the process much easier and more uniform across your organization.

Here are 15 free employee performance review templates for you to use as a starting point in creating your own program. Take a look at these templates and start using them to run an engaging and effective review process with your team!

What is a Performance Review?

A performance review, evaluation, or appraisal formally assesses an employee’s performance. The objective is identifying an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, providing actionable feedback, and setting clear objectives for self-improvement.

In the past, annual performance reviews were the go-to appraisal method for most organizations. However, 92% of employees actually favor detailed feedback from higher-ups more than once a year.

Besides, annual appraisals can be unfair since an employee’s productivity fluctuates several times a year. What works for them now may not work six months from now.

The good thing is that alternative performance evaluation techniques have emerged. For example, you can do a quarterly, bi-annual, or role-based review. The review period can vary from company to company—you’ll have to determine the best approach for your organization.

What matters is that you get the best out of your employees by using reviews to set attainable targets for them.

What makes a good employee performance review template?

A performance appraisal template should include a range of details about the employee and a standardized rating scale for:

• Self-evaluation
• Quality of work
• Work ethic
• Accomplishments
• And other key metrics that reveal their job performance

Moreover, performance review templates should facilitate effective communication between management and their direct reports, encouraging them to work together to set individual and shared goals and keep the process consistent and fair across all employees.

15 Free Performance Review Templates

While most performance review templates are ideal for quarterly, bi-annual, and annual performance reviews, other templates are helpful for employee onboarding, streamlining career paths, and competency development.

Take a look at each one and see how you can use them to improve your performance review process!

1. ClickUp Performance Review Template

Review frequency: Quarterly, bi-annually, or annually

If you’re looking for a simple performance review template that allows you and your employees to compare assessment notes, then this is for you!

This Doc template in ClickUp includes sections where both managers and direct reports can comment on their job understanding, job skills, growth, performance, achievements, and so on.

It also comes with performance measurement codes such as unsatisfactory, fair, good, excellent, and not applicable to give you help you establish a rating scale.

The ClickUp Performance Review Template also breaks up tasks and deliverables in terms of priority and provides room for feedback. So, if you’re looking for a performance review template that adequately assesses employees’ strengths and weaknesses, provides actionable feedback, and sets clear objectives for self-improvement, then you should go for this option.

2. ClickUp Corrective Action Performance Review Template

Review frequency: Monthly or quarterly

This template is suitable for managers looking for an alternative method of improving an employee’s workplace behavior or performance. The template features six major themes: areas for improvement, problems and root causes, possible solutions, the measure of success, task owners, and timeline.

Think of this as a step-by-step performance improvement plan to help give your employee actionable steps to meet performance expectations. The ClickUp Corrective Action Plan Template helps create room for remedial action and provides a visually appealing Whiteboard where you can record all the relevant information and follow up on actions in concrete steps.

3. ClickUp Employee Evaluation Form Template

Review frequency: Weekly or bi-monthly

This simple ClickUp form helps you evaluate employee performance based on the job title and description. This is ideal for setting weekly goals or carrying out bi-monthly appraisals where not many details need to be entered. 

The ClickUp Employee Evaluation Form Template contains these Custom Fields, including awards and milestones received, total hours rendered, job title, areas to improve, works well with a team, technical skills, evaluation date, pending tasks, the number of tasks completed, and communication skills.

4. ClickUp 30-60-90 Day Plan Template

Review frequency: After one, two, and three months

The ClickUp 30-60-90 Day Plan Template is great for onboarding your new hires and establishing professional development plans from the start.

Since a full performance assessment isn’t ideal for new hires, managers can take the 30-60-90 approach to check in and assess their performance after the first, second, and third months to evaluate the new hire’s performance with on-the-job expectations.

Use this template to access an onboarding board, onboarding plan, onboarding progress, calendar, chat, and references section.

This approach and template can help you understand whether new hires have adjusted their focus areas, priorities, and expectations, as well as if more training or other actions are needed to get them acclimated to their role.

5. ClickUp Career Path Template

Review frequency: Bi-annually or annually

The Career Path Template lets you match an employee’s career expectations with your company vision. With this template, you can visualize endless career pathways for an employee on a digital whiteboard.

Think of it as a “career mind map” that allows you to create different professional development scenarios for an employee.

You can operate multiple frameworks and templates to manage information related to their growth, career opportunities, learning outcomes, and benefits. The template also features attractive visualizations, such as smart formatting, color themes, shapes, and connectors. 

6. ClickUp Employee Weekly Report Template

Review frequency: Weekly

With weekly reports, employees can discuss their achievements and areas of opportunities for the past week and set reasonable goals for the coming week.

Map out your expectations and note urgent activities that employees should undertake with the Employee Weekly Report Template. Use this weekly report template to improve accountability across teams and empower them to take ownership of their time and work.

The benefit here is that you can track progress, celebrate wins, and determine bottlenecks and roadblocks every week. Understanding wins and areas opportunities can boost employee morale and better plan for the upcoming weeks.

7. Microsoft Word Employee Evaluation Template

Review frequency: Monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or annually

This Microsoft Word template allows managers to evaluate their workers’ performance levels and wage structures. You can customize the template as you wish and use a rating system to assess an employee’s performance.

The rating system focuses on areas such as accountability, punctuality, attendance, flexibility, completion of assignments, quality of work, organizational skills, confidentiality, conflict resolution, and willingness to develop skills. The template has 37 focus areas, although you can always add or remove some to fit your company’s needs and structure.

Managers can look at the current wage per hour in the wage review section and recommend a new one based on the overall performance score. If you wish to cut down the wages of nonperforming employees or reward top performers, this template is ideal for you. 

8. Excel Project Performance Report Template

Review frequency: Bi-annually or annually

You can use this Excel template to examine the performance of high-priority projects within the organization. This template is particularly important since you can collaborate with the accounting or finance departments to determine the efficiency of specific organizational programs. Some key areas of focus are how the budget has been used, the actual costs of items involved, cost variances, and schedule variances.

With the template, you can rest assured that the company’s resources are being utilized as expected. Performance reporting is important because it involves gathering project data and then using it to communicate progress.

Managers can use project performance review templates to analyze how employees have contributed to project success or failure.

9. Someka Excel Annual Performance Review Template

Review frequency: Annually

The Excel annual performance review template also has a rating system that helps you evaluate employee performance. Managers can fill in employees’ basic information and backgrounds on the template’s first tab. The next tab gives you a performance rating system—you can rate an employee’s performance in a specific area as poor, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory. However, you can only rate a single performance factor below each of the three rating metrics.

Overall, the Excel annual performance review template has an easy-to-fill professional design and is print ready. You also need not install it on your Mac or Windows systems.

Furthermore, you can alter the rating system and the metrics to suit your preferences.

10. Google Sheets Objectives & Outcomes Performance Review Template

Review frequency: Annually

The Google Sheets Objectives and Outcomes Performance Review template combines an employee self-assessment area with a manager’s assessment section. The template allows companies to evaluate whether employees have achieved the predetermined goals and objectives. There’s even room for managers to examine how well an employee’s behavior aligns with the company’s values. 

What makes this template unique is the need to give written responses so that employees can receive their performance ratings. This way, there can be no bias since employees can review your comments before appending their signatures at the bottom.

The easy-to-use format also makes it less challenging for employees to understand managers’ thought processes that led to the performance ratings. It is also easy to identify what they can do to meet goals and objectives in the coming year.

11. PeopleGoal Google Sheets Employee Competency Performance Review

Review frequency: Annually

While the Google Sheets Objectives and Outcomes Performance Review template focuses on employees’ annual performance and how they align with company values, this one rates their core competencies. The template uses organizational seniority by ranking employees based on job roles and is ideal for hierarchical organizations. 

With each job role, there is a list of core competencies, a rating tab, a weighting tab, and a comments section. For example, if an employee is an analyst, you can focus on competencies such as technical ability and team communication. This gives you an overview of potential areas for improvement.

The five weightings are top performer, exceeds expectations, meets expectations, needs improvement, and significantly underperforms. However, you won’t be locked into the rating scale above. You can customize the competency weightings as you like based on what is vital for your organization.

12. GooDocs Google Docs Performance Review Template

Review frequency: Quarterly, bi-annually, or annually

This simple, single-page performance review template lets you comment on an employee’s overall performance, goals achieved, areas for improvement, and core values.

Think of it as a condensed performance appraisal form that integrates all important areas of concern without going into too much detail. If you’re a small business owner, then this template is ideal for your organization. 

Besides its easy-to-fill formatting, the Google Docs performance review template is also visually appealing. There is a blend of gray and purple colors that augments the beauty of its layout. You can additionally edit the document to fit your needs and preferences and print it out at no cost.

13. Template.net Microsoft Word Restaurant Employee Performance Review Form Template

Review frequency: Quarterly, bi-annually, or annually

This evaluation template is ideal for assessing the performance of restaurant employees. It focuses on highlighting the workers’ achievements and potential areas for improvement. The rating system has five metrics: outstanding, above average, average, below average, and very poor. 

The template also gives a side-by-side rating: the employee’s self-rating and a manager’s rating. Ratings are given for specific competencies, such as creativity, honesty, and work ethic. On the second page, you can write down whether the predetermined goals have been attained, which should match the ratings in the first section. 

As this is a downloadable Word document, you can always edit the tables, the rating system, and the core competencies to suit your organizational needs.

14. Microsoft Word Employee Development Template

Review frequency: Annually

This annual performance review template is a six-page document that helps collect information for creating employees’ Individual Development Plans (IDPs). The aim is to help each employee in their personal and career development. The template provides a blueprint that managers can follow towards creating these development plans by going into detail regarding the key areas.

15. Template.net Employee Performance Review Template

Review frequency: Bi-annually and annually

The last example in our list of 15 free employee performance review templates is this employee performance review document that covers all the important prerequisites on a single page. The template contains four main areas for review: employee information, performance evaluation, opportunities for development, and reviewer comments.

The performance evaluation section focuses on core competencies, such as cooperation, enthusiasm, attitude, punctuality, job knowledge, and communication skills.

Regardless of your organization or industry, you can customize this condensed document to suit your preferences. It also comes in Google Docs and Microsoft Word formats, meaning that you can edit or print it at your convenience.

Improve Your Performance Review Process with Templates

Giving and receiving feedback is an important part of any workplace. It helps us grow, learn, and improve our skills. However, it can be hard to know where to start, what to include, and how to make the process more engaging for everyone involved.

That’s why we’ve created this library of free performance review templates. Use these 15 templates to help you improve your next performance review and create an effective and engaging performance review program to help your business and your people thrive.

The best thing about the ClickUp’s HR templates is that they’re customizable and free to use—simply download and configure them to fit your needs.

And because ClickUp is an all-in-one project management tool that works for every team, you can create, edit, and store your performance review alongside your work. Connect your review templates to your tasks, employee directory, and other important files, then track progress using our powerful tools like Goals and Dashboards. Yep. It’s that simple. 😊