How to Conduct a Performance Review Meeting: A Manager’s Guide

A performance review meeting is a formal discussion between an employee and their manager to evaluate the employee’s work performance over a certain period.

Use this step-by-step guide to conduct effective performance review meetings with your employees. Whether your organization uses annual performance reviews, or more frequent performance check-ins, learn tips and avoid common mistakes to become better equipped to handle these conversations.

How to prepare for a performance review meeting

Proper preparation will ensure an effective and motivating performance review meeting. Follow these steps for the best results:

Gather and review performance data

If your organization uses standardized performance review forms, ensure you answer all questions.

If your organization uses a 360 feedback system, ensure all reviewers have submitted their feedback (e.g., peers, direct reports if relevant, and self-evaluations).

Tip: Ensure you know what feedback you should present to your employees and how to interpret the results.

Set objectives for the meeting

Define the objectives of your performance review meeting. Ideally, you want your employee to leave with clear goals and action steps and no ambiguity on the results of their performance evaluation. You also want them to feel motivated and inspired to keep working and perform even better.

The worst thing is to enter a meeting with no clear agenda and realize you’ve just been doing small talk for the entire meeting duration without clear insights and action steps.

Example objective: By the end of the meeting, the employee should have three clear goals for the next quarter and a personal development plan.

Create and share a meeting agenda

A successful performance review meeting starts before the set time and day; it begins as you send the meeting invitation. In the invitation, include an outline of the agenda, any preparations, and what your employees can expect.

The agenda should outline what you will cover in the meeting. A typical agenda for a performance management meeting includes:

1. Welcome and introduction (5 minutes)
2. Review of previous goals and performance (15 minutes)
3. Feedback discussion (5 minutes)
4. Setting new goals (10 minutes)
5. Employee input(10 minutes)
6. Action plan and next steps (10 minutes)
7. Closing remarks (5 minutes)

Send the meeting agenda to your workers ahead of time via email.

A step-by-step guide to conducting an effective performance review meeting

Follow these essential steps to ensure your performance review meetings are comprehensive and impactful.

Open the meeting and set a positive tone

Begin the performance review meeting with a warm welcome and outline the purpose of the meeting.

Provide an overview of the meeting agenda to set expectations for how the meeting will progress.

Discuss the employee’s performance

This section of the meeting will focus on employee performance. The manager will share the insights they gathered during the preparation process:

• Goal completion in relation to previously set objectives and metrics
• Achievements and areas for improvement
• Competency mastery (relevant for competency-based appraisals)

Work with goals

Good performance is a highly subjective concept if we don’t use goals. The foundation for evaluations is how your employees perform compared to their individual (and team-specific) goals.

Our recommended goal-setting method is SMART goals to set goals that are:

• Specific: There should be no ambiguity about the scope of the goal

An example of a non-specific goal is “grow our social media following.” A specific goal would be to “grow our social media following by 5000 followers within two months”. That example also entails other parts of the SMART goals.

• Measurable: A measurable goal means that you are working with a key metric that can be quantified.

In the above example, “5000 followers” is a target that makes the goal measurable.

• Achievable: To keep employees motivated, it’s essential that the goals seem within reach (with some effort)

If the goal is too far-fetched, they might feel disheartened

• Relevant: There should be a clear reason for why you’re working toward this particular goal

For example, checking social media metrics would be more appropriate for a marketing manager than a customer service representative.

• Time-bound: You need a deadline for reaching the goal. Ideally, you want to work with goals that you can attain before the next performance review meeting so that you can discuss the outcome.

A SMART goal should be easily understood even by someone without expertise in your niche. For example, everyone can understand the concept of acquiring 5000 followers within two months, even with little understanding of social media. Employees can then work toward these goals before their following performance review.

Discuss accomplishments and shortcomings

Using goals enables objective employee performance measurement—it will be easier to see where the employee met or exceeded expectations and where they fell short.

Use these top tips for talking about accomplishments:

• Discussing their performance and giving constructive feedback is the central part of a performance review meeting
• Focus on how employees can avoid repeating what went wrong instead of guilting past mistakes
• Find the balance between being empathetic and inspiring a sense of urgency
• Ensure that any feedback you offer is as constructive and objective as possible—use concrete examples and metrics to strengthen your arguments
• Use active listening to make your employees feel heard and have the message land better
• Maintain eye contact if the meeting is in person, and keep looking at the screen if you have an online discussion
• Don’t be afraid of silence—the most significant breakthroughs come when we give people space to reflect and connect the dots instead of rushing to fill in and avoid a potentially awkward silence

Discuss areas of improvement

The areas where your employee didn’t meet their goals should ideally be the focus of this section of the meeting. Listen to the employee perspective: Why do they think they didn’t meet the goal?

• Was it due to poor performance, work ethics, and lack of motivation?
• Could you have done more to support them?
• Would they have needed additional training or resources?
• Are there any gaps in the performance review process?
• Or were the employee performance goals too optimistic?

Whatever the reason, managers and employees need to agree on areas of improvement before moving forward.

Questions you can ask for additional insights into employee performance:

1. Are you surprised by any of the feedback I shared with you today?
2. How do you feel about your progress towards your goals this period?
3. What achievements are you most proud of?
4. What challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them?
5. How can I better support you in your role?
6. What skills or areas would you like to develop further?
7. Do you have any feedback for me or suggestions for improving our team’s performance?
8. What are your career aspirations, and how can we help you achieve them?

When discussing areas of growth, coach your employees by encouraging them to come up with solutions instead of imposing them.

Set goals for the next review period

Let the learnings from the previous goal-setting inform the goals for the coming period.

For example, working with strength-based goals can help create an action plan to leverage someone’s strengths instead of fixing their weaknesses. It can help encourage employees to do a better job. Plus, many people enjoy doing things they are good at more than things they find challenging.

Provide access to training, mentorship, and other resources to support skill growth.

Document the discussion and schedule follow-ups

Document the discussion and keep detailed notes to ensure clarity and follow-up on key points.

We recommend regular check-ins during the coming review period. Plan monthly or quarterly meetings to review progress toward goals and address any challenges.

Ask employees to periodically evaluate their own progress and identify areas for improvement.

How do you conduct a difficult performance review? Tips for handling sensitive topics

As a manager, you must be ready to address sensitive issues (such as underperformance) during the performance review meeting, which can be the most nerve-wracking part of the meeting.

Here are our top tips for rising to the challenge.

• Back your feedback with data to make it as objective as possible: For example, instead of saying, “Your performance hasn’t been up to standards,” say, “Your sales goal for the last evaluation period was $1M, and you achieved $100k.” The underperformance is just a fact and not a personal opinion
• Invite your employee to share their thoughts about the area where they underperformed. For example, “What do you have to say about your sales results during the last evaluation period?”—if they are self-aware, they will know their results were below expectations and provide additional context—however, there may be cases where employees lack self-awareness and accountability
• Be compassionate and empathetic: Try to understand if there is an underlying reason for performance shortcomings or missed goals
• Plan what to say, but don’t make a script: Mentally prepare yourself by thinking through potential outcomes and how you will handle each of them—your words need to flow naturally and not feel forced
• Be open to changing your mind: Performance review meetings are not interrogations. You are not there to try to unveil someone’s past mistakes or make them feel guilty for things that went wrong. You are there to help them reach their full potential moving forward
• Cultivate a growth mindset by focusing on lessons learned and possibilities for improvement

We can’t be too prepared to deal with sensitive topics. If you need more practice, check out our training on giving and receiving feedback.

Common mistakes to avoid in performance review meetings

Planning and preparation are key for ensuring you conduct motivating performance review meetings. Here are some specific mistakes to avoid:

1. Being unprepared: Not reviewing the employee’s performance data or having specific examples
2. Focusing only on negatives: Overemphasizing weaknesses without recognizing achievements
3. Using vague feedback: Providing general comments instead of specific, actionable insights
4. Not listening actively: Failing to give the employee a chance to share their perspective
5. Ignoring development opportunities: Not discussing ways to support the employee’s growth
6. Setting unclear goals: Establishing goals that are not specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, or time-bound (SMART)
7. Rushing the discussion: Not allowing enough time for a thorough and meaningful conversation
8. Failing to follow up: Not scheduling regular check-ins to review progress and adjust goals

Enable more meaningful performance review meetings with Deel Engage

Performance review meetings are essential to the review process and something your organization shouldn’t overlook. The outcome of a meeting can make or break your employee’s motivation and results and, thus, your company’s performance.

Knowing that the most strategic use of your time is to prepare for how to deliver the feedback. A less optimal, time-consuming thing is the administration behind a performance review meeting.

Deel Engage’s performance management module will streamline the administration of your view system:

• Collect feedback from multiple perspectives, including peer, manager, and self-reviews
• Track progress against goals
• Assess employee skills and competencies
• Assess employees against current and future level expectations
• Launch performance reviews with a few clicks by automatically adding employees to review cycles according to criteria such as hire date or belonging to specific departments or groups
• Trigger notifications and reminders for all participants
• Identify skill gaps and areas for improvement
• Check-in on employee performance during the review period

Use the training and development modules to address performance gaps and upskill your workforce. Additionally, Deel HR, our truly global HRIS solution, is always included for free.

Request your free demo today.