20 Annual Review Templates & Examples for Year-End Reviews

Annual reviews are an excellent way for companies to gauge employees' existing contributions and relay future expectations for the benefit of the company.

If you’re looking to strengthen your brand's performance appraisal process, we suggest you use ready-made annual review examples and templates to get a head start. In this article, we’ll show you 20 of the best annual review templates you can find on the internet to effectively evaluate the performance of your employees.

Before we dive in, here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit annual review templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:

Table of Contents

• What Is an Annual Review?
• How to Write an Annual Review
• 20 Annual Review Templates You Can Customize
• 3 Tips for Effective Annual Reviews

Quick Read

• An annual review is the process of assessing employee performance over the past year.
• The annual performance assessment involves tracking employee KPIs and identifying employees' strengths and weaknesses.
• Year-end reviews also entail measuring employee quality of work and providing feedback on potential areas of improvement.
• Yearly reviews help businesses identify high-performing employees, boost employee engagement, relay expectations and foster a progressive environment of growth and progress.
• A business year-in-review template has these elements: header, employee’s basic information, review period, tasks to be evaluated, performance score rating, future goals and expectations, comments and feedback and signatures.
• When reviewing employee performance, make it a two-way communication, offer actionable feedback and do continuous follow-up.
• Visme offers a comprehensive library of annual performance review templates that can be customized in minutes using its intuitive editor.

What Is an Annual Review?

An annual review, or year-end review, is the process of evaluating employee performance over the past year. Annual reviews are typically done by managers but can also be self-conducted.

Generally, an annual performance assessment includes:

• Tracking employee KPIs
• Identifying employee's strengths and weaknesses
• Measuring employee quality of work
• Providing feedback on potential areas of improvement

Needless to say, an annual review is a critical part of any successful business.

It helps businesses identify high-performing employees, boost employee engagement, relay expectations and foster a progressive environment of growth and progress.

On the other hand, employees can also use this time to communicate their future expectations to the company, whether it's their next year's KPIs, personal goals, monetary compensation, bonus structure breakdown, or expected promotions.

At the end of an annual review, managers evaluate whether the company's future goals align with employees' objectives and decide if they should be recommended for a raise or promotion in the coming year.

How to Write an Annual Review

When it comes to preparing for a year-end review, there isn’t any one-size-fits-all approach.

This is majorly due to the type of industry you’re in and the fact that every employee has unique goals for which they’re being evaluated. But that doesn't mean that you can’t create a generic layout for all performance reviews.

In this section, we look at some of the most common sections you can add to your annual review templates:

• Header. The header is the first thing that the reviewer and reviewee will notice on the annual review document, so it's a good idea to add your company’s name, logo and branding to give it an overall professional outlook. In Visme, you can upload your logo with a few clicks and add it to any project.

• Employee’s basic information. For identification and analysis purposes, it is also important that you add a section where the employee’s basic information can be written, including their name, ID and position in the company.
• Review period. To streamline the entire annual review process, it is critical that you add a section that states the period for which the review is being conducted.
• Tasks to be evaluated. This is the main section of the annual review template, so mention all the yearly goals for which the employee is being evaluated.
• Performance score rating. For each task mentioned earlier, make sure you leave adequate space where the reviewer can rate the employee's quality of work. You can do this through a 5-star review system, Likert scale or even by adding an empty box where reviewers can describe their evaluation. Some of Visme's templates come with a pre-designed rating scale you can use for your own company.

• Future goals and expectations. Once the evaluation phase is complete, you can now add a section where employees’ future expectations can be written down.
• Comments and feedback. An annual review process is incomplete without a feedback section. Add it to your template so the reviewer can comment on employees’ performance and recommend them for a raise or promotion.
• Signatures. Lastly, include a section where both parties can add their signatures and acknowledge the entire performance appraisal process.

If you're out of time and need to create your report quickly, Visme's AI document generator can help you create one. Simply input your prompt, choose your preferred style, and let the wizard produce stunning reports in seconds. You can customize every aspect of your document using our intuitive editor.

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