# Work Review Examples - and How to Write Your Own Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/work-review-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/work-review-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 Most work review examples are phrase banks you cannot honestly copy. Here is what makes one usable, plus eight steps to writing a review of your own work. ## Key facts - Title: Work Review Examples - and How to Write Your Own - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Communication - Primary keyword: work review examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/work-review-examples/ ## What this page covers - Most work review examples are phrase banks you cannot honestly copy. Here is what makes one usable, plus eight steps to writing a review of your own work. - Practical guidance for work review examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation There is a form waiting somewhere with a box for achievements and a box for areas of development, the deadline is close, and both boxes are still empty. Most work review examples are phrase banks: long lists of ready-made sentences sorted by competency, written for a manager describing somebody else. They are useful for seeing the register a review is written in, and close to useless for filling in your own. A usable example has three parts — the situation, what you did, and what changed because of it. That third part is where nearly every draft comes apart, and the reason has less to do with wording than it appears. ## What makes a work review example worth copying The first page of results is almost entirely software vendors competing on volume. Rippling publishes 88 phrases, Leapsome 135, Hibob more than 150, Quantum Workplace 171, PerformYard over 200, and Factorial advertises more than a thousand. They are sorted into the same competency buckets each time — communication, teamwork, time management, problem-solving, attitude, quality of work — and they are genuinely comprehensive. That is the problem. An example arrives stripped of the reasoning that would tell you whether it fits your year, which is why it is possible to open four of these pages in a row and still have nothing to type. There is a second mismatch, quieter and more consequential. Nearly all of this material is written from the manager's chair, evaluating somebody else in the third person, while a large share of the people looking for it are employees filling in a self-assessment about themselves in the first person. The two are not interchangeable. A manager writing that someone dependably delivers high-quality work on schedule is recording an observation. You writing the same thing about yourself is making a claim, and a claim with no evidence attached reads as either boasting or padding. Rippling's self-evaluation guidance, Culture Amp and Lattice all arrive at the same short list of dead phrases for that reason: hard worker, team player, goes above and beyond, wore many hats. They appear in thousands of reviews and measure nothing. A fair number of the phrase banks are built out of them. The published standard, across Hibob, Quantum Workplace and Personio, is that a review should be specific, balanced and forward-looking. Specific means a result you could point at. Balanced is the one people misread as diplomacy: a self-review with no development area in it does not read as strong performance, it reads as low self-awareness, and that is something a reviewer notices on its own. Forward-looking means part of the document is about the period ahead rather than the one behind. If the development box is the part you are quietly dreading, it costs little to get a sense of [where your own gaps sit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before the form asks you outright, since the honest answer is usually a habit you have not built yet rather than a verdict on you. ## How to write your work review, step by step The sequence matters more than the phrasing. The preparation guides worth reading — ClickUp, Quantum Workplace, Pathwise, Teamflect, Sprad — put the same stages in the same order, and most drafts stall because people start at step four. ### 1. Find out what you are actually being rated on Before writing anything, get hold of the form, the rating scale and the list of competencies it uses, and pull up the goals that were set at the start of the period. Pathwise's checklist is blunt about the second half of that: for each goal, find the measurable outcome. Two weeks out is a comfortable time to do this. Everything downstream sorts itself into these categories, so learning them late means rewriting. If your employer has never shown you the form, asking for it is a normal administrative question. ### 2. Gather the evidence Now go looking for what you actually did. The guides name the same places every time: your calendar, your task tracker, project documents, message threads, saved feedback notes, and any log you keep for yourself. Collect the numbers where numbers exist — throughput, delivery dates, project outcomes — and the qualitative material too, including any message where somebody thanked you. This takes an hour or two from cold, and ten minutes if you keep a running file. Nothing in the later steps can be invented here, which is why the blank box feels impossible when you skip it. ### 3. Sort it into the categories the form uses Take everything you gathered and file each item under the competency it evidences. Some employers use the classic set; others, as Pathwise notes, work with buckets like execution, scope, collaboration, quality, customer impact and technical judgment. Match your evidence to their categories rather than your own, because the person rating you is reading down their list, not yours. When you finish, some buckets will be full and one or two will be empty. Empty is information, not failure — it usually means the work happened and went unrecorded, or that it genuinely did not happen this period. ### 4. Turn each item into a sentence that contains a result This is the step that produces the examples you came looking for, and it only works now that steps two and three are done. Two named formats are in circulation: STAR — situation, task, action, result — which most people meet in interview preparation, and SBI, for situation, behavior, impact, recommended in ClickUp's and People Managing People's guidance. SBI is the tighter of the two for written reviews because the impact clause is compulsory; you cannot finish the sentence without saying what changed. Run each item through one of them. "I helped with the migration" becomes a sentence naming which migration, what you did on it, and what was true afterward that was not true before. Then delete every remaining sentence that describes effort without an outcome. ### 5. Write the development area honestly One real weakness, paired with what you are already doing about it. The published examples here are written in the manager's voice — the standard illustration is something like occasionally [struggling with time management](/knowledge/time-management/bad-time-management/), leading to delays in project completion — and your job is to convert that register into the first person without softening it into nothing. Name the situation where it shows up, say what it cost, and say what you have changed since. One well-chosen development area is stronger than three vague ones, and much stronger than none, which reads as either defensiveness or not having looked. ### 6. Say what you want next Every process guide includes a forward-looking section — Teamflect, Sprad and Elevate Leadership all treat it as required rather than optional — asking for your [development goals](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/appraisal-goals/), the skills you want to build, the responsibilities you would like to take on, and the support that would help. For anyone in their first few years this is the highest-value box on the page, because it is the only one concerned with what happens next. Be concrete. A named project you want on, or a specific skill with a reason attached, is actionable in a way that wanting to grow is not. ### 7. Cut the filler, check the numbers, submit early Read the draft once with a single purpose: removing the dead phrases from earlier. Anything that could sit unchanged in a stranger's review does not belong in yours. Verify every figure you quote, because one wrong number costs more credibility than the number was worth. Then submit ahead of the deadline. A review that lands early gets read properly; one that arrives on the closing evening gets skimmed alongside everyone else's, a poor return on the work you just did. ### 8. Use the meeting, then open next period's file In the conversation itself, [listen before you explain](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/appraisal-feedback/). Take in what is being said, ask about anything unclear, and only then add your own view where your rating and theirs do not match — in that order rather than all at once. Take notes. Leave with the next period's goals written down in the words you both used. Then, the same week, open an empty file and start dropping things into it as they happen. Everyone who found step two easy is doing this, and it is the only part of the whole process that compounds. ## What a review is really asking you to be good at Read back over those eight steps and very little of it is writing. It is keeping track of your own work, being straight about it in a document someone else will judge, and putting it in language that person can actually use. **Working with Your Manager** covers the part of this that happens outside the form. A review is something you prepare for and influence rather than receive: you come in with evidence, you keep the discussion pointed at the next period, and you ask for what you want instead of hoping it gets offered. The same skill covers the habits that make the following review easier — meeting regularly, keeping your results visible as they happen — which is what people mean when they say a review should contain no surprises. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes the two hardest boxes possible. Naming what you are genuinely good at, rather than merely competent at, is harder than it sounds and is precisely what the strengths section requires. And there is a workable order for taking evaluative feedback: understand what is being said first, then add your own view, then reflect on it afterward, rather than attempting all three simultaneously while your manager is still talking. **Communication** decides whether the evidence survives the trip to the page. Be clear, be direct, be brief, and put the main point first — that is the difference between a sentence a reviewer can rate and one they have to interpret. Writing was the right medium to choose here, too: your manager can reread a document, weigh it, and carry it into a calibration discussion you are not in the room for. Review forms rate you against a handful of competencies. The [short read on your strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) does something comparable across twelve, and it is the quickest way to see which of these three you have in hand and which one is quietly costing you. None of them is a disposition you were issued at birth. They are ordinary skills, learned late by most people and learned well anyway. ## The second one of these is much easier than the first Some of this may already describe how you work — a folder of saved messages, a habit of writing down what a project actually produced. If so, you have most of what step two asks for and the rest is arrangement. If not, the gap is a filing habit and a sentence pattern, and both are learnable in an afternoon by anyone, whatever they are like as a person. That is worth knowing now rather than later, because these documents do not stop. There will be one next period and one after that, with more riding on each, and the wording matters less every time while the evidence habit matters more. Looking up how a review should be written, before the deadline rather than during the last hour of it, is the part most people skip entirely. You have already done that. ## A clearer picture, whenever you want it The remaining question is which of these is worth your attention first. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your own work skills: it shows you where you stand across all twelve of the ones that shape working life, including the ones behind preparing for a review, taking feedback without flinching, and making your contribution visible in the first place — and which of them would make the most difference to you right now. ## 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? Most work review examples are phrase banks you cannot honestly copy. Here is what makes one usable, plus eight steps to writing a review of your own work. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Communication. ### 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/communication.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/work-review-examples/ Preferred summary: "Most work review examples are phrase banks you cannot honestly copy. Here is what makes one usable, plus eight steps to writing a review of your own work." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.