Guide to Employee Review Questions [+Employee Review Meeting Template]

Encouraging your employees to give feedback and voice their ideas, opinions, and concerns can positively impact your business performance. Incorporating the input into your standard operating procedures and company culture gives you a decided edge on the market.

Soliciting employee feedback affords you rarefied insights into what's happening at every level of your company. It's a proven way to bolster employee productivity and engagement while unlocking motivation.

Asking the right employee review questions during employee review meetings unlocks a treasure trove of critical information that would otherwise remain accessible.

What are Employee Review Questions?

Employee review questions are a series of questions crafted to help managers gain valuable insights from their workers. Managers use these questions to understand their team's goals and aspirations and what they can do the help their employees be more productive.

Employee review questions are a staple during an employee performance review. Traditionally, employee reviews were yearly. However, most companies gravitate towards semi-annual and quarterly check-ins, sometimes weekly, in response to the changing work environment.

Employee review questions are an excellent employee performance management tool because they offer managers deep insights into their team. They can help you understand, manage, and utilize your team's strengths to hone your firm's competitive edge. On the flip side, they reveal any shortcomings and difficulties that your team could be experiencing to let you take quick corrective measures.

Employee review questions allow managers to understand an employee's personal goals and provide them with constructive feedback aligned to these goals. Most importantly, they enable managers to create a blueprint to attain these goals together.

Giving and receiving feedback is central to any employee performance review as it allows managers to become better leaders. Managers gain valuable insights that they can incorporate into their leadership.

Why It's Important to Ask Employees for Feedback

People don't leave jobs: they leave managers goes an adage that holds in today's corporate environment.

Even when you believe you're doing a great job, asking for employee feedback can help you avoid such a crisis. Your employees might not share the same opinion, and you might be driving them to quit the company.

Asking employees to give feedback on your performance can help you enhance engagement, decrease turnover, and improve productivity. Naturally, most people are hesitant to provide negative feedback to their managers out of the fear of repercussions for their careers.

Asking the right questions can encourage employees to give feedback without negatively impacting their careers.

Here are some core benefits of employee feedback:

Gaining Insights into Employee Performance

Asking team members how they feel about their overall performance offers insights into what they're proud of and feel they've accomplished. It helps you understand what motivates them, establish what they're struggling with, and what you can do to help them thrive in the workplace.  

Uncovering Underutilized Skills

Acknowledging what an employee is doing well in their current role and enquiring about their strengths can give you a different perspective. Inquiring about perceived strengths might unveil that an employee has other valuable but under-utilized skills.

Identifying Areas of Improvement

A constructive approach when addressing areas where an employee didn't achieve their set goals creates a win-win situation. You get to understand your employee's shortcomings and what you can do to help them fare better. They might require additional training, weekly check-ins, or a bit of mentoring.

Understanding Employees Roles

Asking about an employee's current role gives you insights into what they like or dread about their job and responsibilities. It allows you to reorganize their tasks and duties to accommodate their needs and improve productivity.

You get a chance to clarify how each role fits into the company's bigger picture. You can help workers understand the value they add to the company, which might cause them to rethink their position. Ultimately, you can help them get comfortable with the troublesome roles and improve their performance.

Supporting Professional Development

Asking employees about their professional goals and aspirations can help zero in on what motivates them. It sheds light on the support they need to realize their goals. This feedback allows you to develop the tools and resources necessary to support your worker's professional development. Besides helping your team hit their goals, company-backed professional development improves job satisfaction and employee retention.

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Best Practices for Creating Employee Review Questionnaires

Employee feedback can make or break your organization. It makes the difference between a healthy and thriving company and one that clings to an unhealthy status quo that undermines employees' health, career projections, productivity, and ultimately, profits.

While soliciting employee feedback is critical to a company's success, it can be somewhat uncomfortable and hard to take. Getting the most out of your employee reviews entails asking hard questions. Asking hard questions takes courage and can be logistically challenging and uncomfortable.

Following these best practices when formulating employee reviews, questionnaires let you collect honest feedback from your employees.

1. Don't fill the questionnaire with lots of tough questions
2. Tailor the questions to reflect what an employee does daily.
3. Word the questions carefully to minimize vague or subjective replies.
4. Base your questions on the 12 elements of employee engagement or Q12.
5. Customize your questions to address if one of the 12 principles is true or not.
6. Replace yes/no questions with scored responses if you wish to track results over time or need more details.
7. Use open-ended questions or ask for lists when you need employees to provide action items. These are handy when addressing areas to improve or when you need to recognize achievement.  

How to Get the Most Out of Your Employee Feedback Surveys

An employee feedback survey aims to encourage employees to provide honest, reliable, and actionable information. That calls for a diplomatic approach when formulating your employee feedback questions.

• Avoid broad, generic questions as they provide little, if any, meaningful takeaways.
• Ask specific, targeted questions specially formulated to address the employee's role.
• Shorten the review cycle to quarterly or monthly check-ins instead of the long yearly or bi-yearly sessions.
• Keep the review short by limiting the number of questions.

How Employee Reviews Can Improve Your Company Culture

Company culture may be expressly cultivated or result from accumulated company decisions. Successful companies develop a deliberate workplace culture and shape it to fit their needs.

Company culture refers to the shared ethos – values, goals, practices, and attitudes – that characterize your company. It refers to the way employees feel about their work, their beliefs and values, where they think the company is headed, and their role in helping it get there.

Company culture encompasses the company mission, work environment, leadership style, expectations, goals, values, and ethics. Therefore, it has a significant impact on an employee's professional life.

When people work for a company whose workplace culture aligns with their beliefs and attitudes, they're more likely to be diligent, engaged, productive, and loyal. On the flip side, if the company culture doesn't match their expectations or reflect their personal feeling, they're likely to underperform or leave.

Employee reviews allow you to get a sense of how your employees feel about the company and the role they play in it. Asking your employees how they think about your workplace culture can help you understand how to boost morale, productivity, and efficiency.

Employee feedback gives you a sense of their engagement and satisfaction while letting you zero in on the most salient issues. Understanding how your corporate culture affects employee engagement lets you take corrective measures.

Feedback provides you insights into your strengths and weaknesses. You can then use the information to create a blueprint to help capitalize on your strengths and take corrective measures to shore up the shortcomings.

Examples of Employee Review Questions

There's no room for mediocre employee review questions. Each question must be specific and targeted to help address individual performance while uncovering employee goals, and motivations.

Deferring to broad, generic questions bears little to no fruit. It whittles the entire process to a mere formality instead of a highly productive tool.

Asking deep and thoughtful questions makes your employees feel seen, valued, and appreciated. It also provides you with an avenue to champion their professional growth and development.  

Ideally, you should break employee review questions into various categories for the best results.

Overall Performance

• What accomplishments are you most proud of this quarter?
• Which set goals did you achieve? Which ones fell short?
• What motivates you to achieve your set goals?
• How can I make your job more enjoyable?
• What are your ideal working conditions to be more productive?

Employee Strengths

• What personal strengths are most crucial to doing your job?
• What makes you feel you're the best fit for your position?
• What skills do you possess that you feel are underutilized?
• What kind of work do you enjoy the most?

Areas of Improvement

• What deliverables posed a challenge in the last quarter? Why?
• How will your approach these challenges in the future?
• What will be your top 3 priorities to help you grow and develop in the next quarter?
• What can I do to help you meet your goals?
• What areas do you feel there's room for improvement?

Current Role

• What tasks/responsibilities about your job do you enjoy the most?
• Which tasks do you enjoy the least? Why?
• How do you think your role helps the company to succeed?
• What don't you like or like the least in your current role?
• What would you change in your current job description?
• What do you like the most about working here?

Future Outlook

• What are your primary goals for the next quarter?
• Which role would you like to assume next in this company?
• How would the responsibilities change in your new position?
• What kind of professional growth support do you need to get there?
• Which career path trajectory is important to you?

Manager-employee Relationship

• Do you have any concerns when giving me feedback? What are they?
• What can I do to alleviate those concerns?
• What 2-3 things could I do differently to manage you better?
• What is the most helpful thing I do to help you complete your work?
• What is the least helpful thing I do to help you complete your work?
• What can we do to improve this relationship?

Company Culture

• What are the primary drivers of success in our company?
• Are you comfortable with our workplace culture, and what do you feel needs improvement?
• What do you love about working here?  
• What can we do to make the company more diverse and inclusive?
• What is your proudest moment while working in this company?

Employee Review Meeting Template

This employee review meeting template covers seven critical categories critical to soliciting employee feedback. It outlines the performance evaluation questions that are central to each category.

These specific and targeted questions will demonstrate that you value employee engagement, development, and career progression. Feel free to customize the questions to suit your particular needs and demonstrate that you champion your employees' growth and job satisfaction.

Free Employee Review Meeting Template

Type of Performance Review

Specify the type of review – it could be quarterly, annual, or bi-annual – to provide employees with context

Review Details

Include employee's details such as name, department, job designation, review period, and date of the review and ascertain their accuracy.

Overall Performance

• What accomplishments are you most proud of this quarter?
• Which set goals did you achieve? Which ones fell short?
• What motivates you to achieve your set goals?
• How can I make your job more enjoyable?
• What are your ideal working conditions to be more productive?

Employee Strengths

• What personal strengths are most crucial to doing your job?
• What makes you feel you're the best fit for your position?
• What skills do you possess that you feel are underutilized?
• What kind of work do you enjoy the most?

Areas to Improve

• What deliverables posed a challenge in the last quarter? Why?
• How will your approach these challenges in the future?
• What will be your top 3 priorities to help you grow and develop in the next quarter?
• What can I do to help you meet your goals?
• What areas do you feel there's room for improvement?

Current Role

• What tasks/responsibilities about your job do you enjoy the most?
• Which tasks do you enjoy the least? Why?
• How do you think your role helps the company to succeed?
• What don't you like or like the least in your current role?
• What would you change in your current job description?
• What do you like the most about working here?

Future Outlook

• What are your primary goals for the next quarter?
• Which role would you like to assume next in this company?
• How would the responsibilities change in your new position?
• What kind of professional growth support do you need to get there?
• Which career trajectory is important to you?

Manager-employee relationship

• Do you have any concerns when giving me feedback? What are they?
• What can I do to alleviate those concerns?
• What 2-3 things could I do differently to manage you better?
• What is the most helpful thing I do to help you complete your work?
• What is the least helpful thing I do to help you complete your work?
• What can we do to improve this relationship?

Company Culture

• What are the primary drivers of success in our company?
• Are you comfortable with our workplace culture, and what do you feel needs improvement?
• What do you love about working here?  
• What can we do to make the company more diverse and inclusive?
• What is your proudest moment while working in this company?

Conclusion

Employee review questions are the gateway to building highly effective and productive teams. These questions provide you with the information you need to improve employee performance, productivity, and overall job satisfaction.

Soliciting employee feedback offers rarefied insights into what employees love about your company, the challenges they face, and what you could do better. Asking the right questions lets you take quick corrective measures to create an enabling work environment while demonstrating that you value your employees.