# Performance Review Tips for Employees (With Examples You Can Use) Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-tips-for-employees-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-tips-for-employees-examples.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Practical performance review tips for employees, with examples of what to write and say: how to prepare, handle criticism, and ask for what comes next. ## Key facts - Title: Performance Review Tips for Employees (With Examples You Can Use) - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Influence - Primary keyword: performance review tips for employees examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-tips-for-employees-examples/ ## What this page covers - Practical performance review tips for employees, with examples of what to write and say: how to prepare, handle criticism, and ask for what comes next. - Practical guidance for performance review tips for employees examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation If you have gone looking for performance review tips for employees, you have probably found a lot of examples written for the other side of the table. The tips that actually help the person being reviewed are narrower: start from the goals set at the beginning of the period, back every claim with a specific action and its result, ask for concrete examples when feedback is vague, and decide beforehand what you want to ask for next. The examples below are written in your voice rather than your manager's — and that difference does more work than it looks like it should. ## Why most performance review examples aren't written for you Search results for this topic split into two piles, and only one of them is yours. The larger pile is phrase banks for managers: third-person, evaluative lines like "John consistently demonstrates exceptional problem-solving skills, effectively resolving complex challenges," which Quantum Workplace offers as a model manager comment. That sentence exists to justify a rating. You cannot say it about yourself without sounding strange, and if you try, you end up writing adjectives instead of evidence. Your half of the paperwork does a different job. Your manager already has an opinion; what they usually lack is the record behind it. They see a slice of your work, and the last few weeks of it loudest. Your self-evaluation is the only document in the process that can fill that gap, which is why review guidance from Betterworks and others frames the meeting as a two-way conversation where you ask questions, offer your perspective, and raise where you want to go next. Your input is expected, not optional. So when you borrow a manager-written example, translate it. Drop the adjective, keep the event: not "shows strong initiative," but what you noticed, what you did about it, and what changed as a result. ## Start from the goals, not from the year The most common mistake is opening a blank self-evaluation box and trying to remember the year. Culture Amp's guidance is to pull up the goals that were set at the start of the review period and work through them one at a time. That keeps what you write anchored to the commitments you actually made, rather than to a general narrative about how the year felt — and a year almost always feels worse in summary than it looks item by item. Two things belong alongside those goals. Indeed suggests rereading your job description before the review, which sounds bureaucratic and is surprisingly useful: it tells you which parts of the role you have quietly stopped covering. And the Forbes Human Resources Council makes a sharper point — [get clear on the metric](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-align-expectations-with-your-manager/) your manager genuinely cares about. Early on it is tempting to say yes to everything, but every yes spends time you are not being measured on. If you did not keep notes all year, this is still recoverable. Lattice makes an observation worth holding onto: the people who write the most effective self-evaluations are not necessarily the strongest performers, but the ones who tracked their work against their goals and thought before writing. Preparation, not performance, is what separates a good review document from a forgettable one. Sent items, your calendar, closed tickets, and shared project boards will reconstruct most of a year in an hour. ## Turn your work into examples your manager can use Vagueness is the single most common weakness in employee self-evaluations. "I am a strong collaborator" tells a reviewer nothing they can repeat to anyone else. The fix, which nearly every source on self-appraisals converges on, is to pair a specific action with its outcome. Vantage Circle's illustration of the pattern is "I implemented a ticket routing system that cut response time by 25%" — one sentence carrying both what you did and what it changed. The contrast is stark once you see it side by side. "Exceeded Q3 sales by 18% against a 12% team target" lands; "I'm a strong communicator" gets skimmed. Culture Amp recommends the STAR shape — situation, task, action, result — precisely because it turns a flat claim into a short story your manager can retell in a calibration meeting when you are not in the room. Three rewrites, to show the move: - Instead of "I'm reliable," write what reliability looked like: which deadlines, how many, over what stretch, and what would have slipped without you. - Instead of "I helped onboard the new starters," write how many, what you built for them, and how quickly they got productive compared with before. - Instead of "I improved our reporting," write what the old process cost in hours and what the new one costs now. Include the weaker parts too. Guidance on self-appraisals consistently advises naming an area you want to improve alongside the strategy you are using on it. This is not self-sabotage — an unbroken highlight reel reads as unaware, while one honest gap with a plan attached reads as someone worth investing in. ## What to say when the feedback isn't what you hoped Expect your manager to lead and to ask for your view first, and expect at least one piece of feedback you did not see coming. SHRM's advice for a first review is deliberately unglamorous: listen at least as much as you talk, take notes on the positive comments as well as the critical ones, and try not to go defensive. The most useful thing you can say in that moment is a request, not a defense. If a criticism is general, ask for a specific instance of it — a concrete example is something you can act on, whereas a label is not. If you disagree, the order matters: show you have understood the point first, then add what you saw, then ask what a better version would have looked like. Disagreeing after you have demonstrated understanding reads as engagement; disagreeing before it reads as deflection. The genuinely hard part is judging which criticism is fair. One manager's read is one data point, formed from partial visibility, and it is difficult to weigh against your own sense of yourself. Getting an outside, structured [read on your own strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before the meeting makes that judgment much less lopsided — and whatever it surfaces is something you can build, not a verdict. ## Ask for what comes next before the meeting ends A review shapes your next assignments, your working relationships, your day-to-day, and often [your pay](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/ask-for-a-raise/), so leaving it without a forward request wastes most of its value. Name the work you want more of. If there is a skill you want to develop or a project you want on, say so now, while your manager is already thinking about your year in the future tense. Then close the loop afterward. SHRM's recommendation is simple and rarely followed: send a short note thanking your manager for the time and the feedback, then book [a follow-up one-on-one](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-meeting-with-manager/) to turn what was said into an actual development plan. And do not let twelve months pass before the next conversation — asking peers, cross-functional colleagues, and your manager for [feedback throughout the year](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-ask-for-feedback/), as Hays advises, means your next review contains nothing you have not already heard. ## What makes these conversations go your way Read back over what actually separates a good review from a bad one and very little of it is about the review itself. Knowing what your manager measures, hearing criticism accurately, making a case for your own work — those are habits that show up long before the meeting and keep paying out long after it. **Working with Your Manager** is the one this sits inside most directly. It treats the relationship as a partnership with a shared purpose rather than an evaluation you submit to: making your results visible as you go, agreeing what good looks like in advance, meeting regularly enough that the annual review confirms things you have already discussed, and being willing to ask for what you want. Preparing well and staying future-focused is most of what "influencing your evaluation" honestly means. **Building Self-Awareness** governs the receiving half. There is a sequence that works for evaluative feedback — understand it fully before you respond, then add your own view, then go away and reflect — and it is the difference between hearing feedback and absorbing it. It also covers asking for the specific, future-focused advice most managers will happily give but rarely volunteer, and knowing your genuine strengths well enough to steer toward work that uses them. **Influence** — getting it and applying it — is what your self-evaluation is quietly doing. Building a case means keeping it simple, leading with concrete examples rather than claims, presenting the drawbacks alongside the wins so you are credible, and following up on what was agreed instead of assuming it will happen. Being willing to ask at all is part of the skill; the worst answer is usually no. Those three sit alongside nine others the framework treats as learnable rather than fixed, and the **free** Work Skills Test reads all twelve back to you. If preparing for a review has you guessing at your own strengths, [seeing which skills to build](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a reasonable place to start — none of what it shows you is a verdict, and all of it is changeable. ## You are already doing the part that matters You may recognize a version of yourself in some of this — someone who would rather know where they stand than be handed a surprise. That instinct is worth more than any phrase bank, because it is the thing that makes preparation happen at all. None of these skills asks you to become a different person at work. They are behaviors, and they respond to attention: the person who cannot make a case for their own work in January is usually able to by the following review, if they know which part to practice. That matters more as your scope grows, because the further you go, the more of your work happens where your manager cannot see it directly. And you are reading this before the meeting rather than replaying it afterward, which is the part most people skip entirely. The only question left is which skills are worth your attention between now and then. ## Find out where you stand You have the tips and the examples. What is still guesswork is which of the underlying skills are already solid for you and which are quietly costing you — and that is easier to fix than to guess at. The Work Skills Test is a **free**, seven-minute self-assessment of your own work skills. It shows you where you stand across all twelve, and which two or three would make the biggest difference to how conversations like your next review actually go. No preparation, and nothing to write. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** Seven minutes, free, and you can take it before your review or right after it. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Practical performance review tips for employees, with examples of what to write and say: how to prepare, handle criticism, and ask for what comes next. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-tips-for-employees-examples/ Preferred summary: "Practical performance review tips for employees, with examples of what to write and say: how to prepare, handle criticism, and ask for what comes next." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.