Reviews
Written as you went, not at the end.
A performance review is a year of evidence, ordered and interpreted. The evidence is already here. The ordering is automatic. All that is left is your judgment.
The weekend you lose twice a year
Most of that time is not spent thinking. It is spent searching: scrolling Slack, opening old tickets, trying to work out whether the thing you are half-remembering happened in this review period or the last one. It is archaeology, and you are doing it about work you personally watched happen.
The thinking part — what does this add up to, what should they do next, are they ready — is the part worth your time, and it is usually the part that gets squeezed into the last twenty minutes.
The usual way
- 1. Open a blank form in the HR tool
- 2. Try to remember twelve months
- 3. Search Slack and tickets for specifics
- 4. Write mostly about the last six weeks
- 5. Deliver news the person has not heard before
With Impact Plan
- 1. Open the person's page
- 2. Read the year, already in order
- 3. Add what it adds up to
- 4. Send it
Nothing in it is a surprise, because they watched it accumulate.
What is in it, and where each part came from
What they did
Every approved piece of evidence in the period, dated, in their own words, with the impact stated first.
What it proved
Which of your expectations moved, and when — with the specific work that moved each one attached to it.
What it moved
The key results their work contributed to, and by how much the number shifted.
Where they stand
Readiness against their target, skills the company has validated, and the milestones they passed this year.
What was discussed
Every check-in in the period, the grades on both sides, and which agreements were kept, missed or dropped.
Walk into calibration with a case
Calibration is where promotions are actually decided, and it is an argument. The manager who says "she has been outstanding this year" loses to the one who says "she cut onboarding from three days to four hours in March, ran the migration in July with no incidents, and has been the person three other teams route their hard questions to since spring."
That second manager is not a better advocate. They just kept notes. Every claim in Impact Plan traces to a dated, approved entry, so the case is checkable rather than assertive — and when somebody pushes back, the answer is a link rather than a recollection.
The same is true in the other direction
A conversation about somebody who is struggling is far easier — and far fairer — when there is a dated record of what was expected, what was discussed, and what was agreed and not delivered. The record has to exist before it is needed, which means it has to be built when nothing is wrong.
A review should contain no new information
If somebody learns in a review that you have been unhappy since spring, the review is not the problem. The eight months are.
Impact Plan makes that mistake structurally hard. Your report can see their own expectations, their own assessments, their own growth plan and their own evidence, continuously. By the time the review arrives, both of you have been reading the same page all year, and the meeting is about what to do next rather than about establishing what happened.
0
forms to fill in before you can read the year
12
months represented, not the last six weeks
1
place a claim has to be traced back to
Your company already has a review tool. Fine.
Impact Plan does not need to replace it, and most managers do not try. The company's tool owns the process: the window, the form, the calibration meeting. What it does not own is the twelve months beforehand, which is where the actual content comes from.
So use this as the place the year accumulates. When the window opens, you copy out of something that is already written. The form still gets filled in, in about a tenth of the time, and it is better because it covers the whole year rather than the part you could still recall.
Stop writing reviews from memory.
Set up your first report in about ten minutes. Free forever for teams of five.
No credit card. Your reports never pay.