My first experience with performance review was at Dell. My manager at that time told me to document my work progress continuously.

I did not get what he meant at that time.

I have since had a few performance reviews/discussions over the last 15 years or so I have a better idea of how one should approach Performance Reviews.

Identify your core aka bread-and-butter role

This is the core work that you were hired to do. Let me use an example.

 If your role is an IT support role. The following would be expected.

• Your key role is to ensure the application you support does not have an outage.
• Your actions daily will be to check on the relevant networks, servers, and applications Monitoring Tools or run validation commands depending on the environment.
• Plan for software patches to be tested and deployed.
• Respond to tickets opened by users requesting assistance.

Identify non-core tasks completed/accomplished

As per the example, IT Support role, the following would be outside your normal scope of work

• Training new hires or teammates on resolving issues.
  • Help with training or buddying the juniors in your team, you were in their shoes once. It can be tough being new to a role, be kind.
• Improving your day-to-day job efficiency.
  • Let’s say your regular monitoring activity takes 2 hours to complete. You introduced a tool/script /command, to reduce the time to complete to 30 minutes. This would be considered an additional contribution. 
• Documenting new support processes.
  • There may be cases where a new process is created, or a new application is onboarded.
• Complex support issues resolved, share the experience for others to learn.

How to document your work?

• Email records. If there are email threads regarding a certain case/situation then save the conclusion in a folder.

• Preparing slides for each task done outside your core role is another way.

With ready slides, you can send out a link to your team if the simple issues.

For complex cases, it’s best to set up a call to review and answer questions.

• For the regular work effort, you should be able to generate reports on the number of cases closed and the related metrics. If you don’t have a ticketing system, then this gets a bit complex.

Why Document?

Keeping documents is good practice. You will not need it, but when you do need it it will be a lifesaver.

One practical situation is in a case where your manage changes. With the supporting documents, your new manager will be impressed with your documenting skill.

Classifications

From the background, I have demarcated the core role tasks and non-core role tasks. The reason for this is to show your manager the work that you have accomplished. The demarcations can also show the amount of effort you have put in for non-core roles.

What to put in your Performance Review file?

The performance review document would be a summary of what you have done for the year. Have this document simple. When you have your discussion with your manager you can have this file open and discuss your performance.

Power tips

Power tip 1: Do not peg your performance or task effort with complexity. It should not matter if the task resolved is simple or complex. What’s complex for one person is easy for another. I used to select highlights that were complex realised that this did not matter.

Power tip 2: Only put in positive achievements. If there were cases you did not do so well, be silent on this. If this needs mentioning the manager should initiate.

Power tip 3: Start keeping records of the work you do. In another post, I will share how to make this effortless.

Power tip 4:  Always find ways to improve, if you have the mindset where you only do what is instructed then your performance review will only be from your core role. Look at my example it will be a very short discussion!

Sample Performance Review Document

It would have helped me if I had a sample of someones Performance Review document.

To save you the trouble, here is an example I made up based on the IT support role discussed here.

Final notes

My example is for an IT role, but you can do the same for any job scope. The key would be to identify your core role. If for some reason this is not clear ask your manager. He should be able to define your core role.

Hope this gives you the insight to have a better performance review.

Best of luck with your performance review.