We made it. Winter has officially come to an end. (Cue hallelujah hands.) All around us, the natural world is waking up refreshed and ready to head into a new season.Over here at Formstack, we’re also heading into a new sort of season. We’re finishing up annual performance reviews and jumping into a new review year.While employee performance reviews are certainly not the most exciting aspect of business, they are an important part of human resources management. Regular reviews encourage feedback between employees and managers and help everyone move toward a happy, healthy work life.Formstack’s Talent Team uses our form builder to create and manage each employee evaluation form. These online forms are easy to fill out, and they make overall performance and engagement data more accessible to leadership. What to know more? Here’s how our Talent Team streamlines Formstack’s annual performance review process with online forms:

Self-Assessment Form

Formstack’s annual self-assessment form is sent to all employees during the first quarter of the year. This form gives us a chance to reflect on our performance over the past year, reveal our future goals, and evaluate our manager.The self-assessment form uses several standard Formstack fields that make completing the form a breeze:

• Identifying fields like Name and Email Address
• A Dropdown List field to select our manager’s name
• Date/Time fields to indicate the date of completion and the date range of the performance review

The self-assessment form also makes use of a Matrix field, which allows us to indicate how well we’re living out the tenets of Formstack’s Culture Code.

The rest of the performance review form uses Long Answer fields to gather information about our top accomplishments from the year, future goals, and manager performance.

Employee Performance Review Form

The annual employee performance review form is sent only to employees who are managers, and it goes out at the same time as the self-assessments. Managers must complete a review form for each of their direct reports.This form is essentially a shortened version of the self-assessment form and uses many of the same fields. And similar to the self-assessment form, the employee performance review form allows managers to reflect on their team members’ performance and ability to embody the company’s Culture Code.This form uses Formstack’s security features to ensure managers’ performance reviews remain confidential. The data on the Submissions tab is encrypted so that no one outside of the Talent Team can access review data submitted by managers.

A Seamless Process

Employees and managers have around two weeks to complete and fill out the self-assessment and employee performance review forms. Using Email Logic, submitted forms are sent to the appropriate individuals for review. The self-assessment forms are sent to the direct manager and the Talent Team, and the review forms are sent to the Talent Team.Once all employee performance forms are submitted and reviewed, managers have two weeks to meet with each employee to discuss job performance and engagement. The Talent Team helps facilitate 1:1 meetings and conversations if necessary.From start to end, Formstack’s performance reviews take about a month. And thanks to our own form building tool, the Talent Team doesn’t have to worry about a lot of paper shuffling and document management during that time. They also don’t have to worry about keeping giant hard-copy files on long-term employees—Formstack’s database allows for storage of several years’ worth of employee performance reviews. The process is seamless.

‍Want to learn about other ways Formstack can help you streamline human resource management at your organization? Click below to see how commercial cleaning company KleenMark uses Formstack.