Performance review questions: how to ask the right questions

Traditional annual performance reviews are increasingly being questioned for their limited effectiveness in stimulating growth and providing meaningful feedback. Research shows that such meetings often lead to stress and looking back at the past, rather than focusing on the future development of employees (Harvard Business School, 2025).

Organizations are therefore increasingly transitioning to a more agile approach in which continuous, frequent feedback and conversations about career development take center stage. This ensures that employees better understand which steps they can take to grow and succeed within the organization. In this renewed system, managers and employees together create a clear path toward progress with regular, open dialogues and concrete growth opportunities (Harvard Business School, 2025).

Although traditional annual reviews have not disappeared, they have evolved into more regular, informal, and growth-oriented conversations. This new approach helps to better support and retain employees because it is less about looking back and more about active guidance and utilizing talents (Harvard Business School, 2025).

Performance review question examples

1. Focus on strengths

In the conversation with the manager, agreements are made about the distribution of work based on employees' strengths. Not a one-sided conversation where the manager checks off discussion topics, but pleasant dialogues based on questions. To get a sharper picture of their strengths, employees can use the following performance review questions:

When do I go home (or to work) whistling? What have I achieved and which strengths am I using?
What do I consider an important success from the recent period? What did I do that contributed to the success? What does this say about what I'm good at?
What do I often get compliments about? Which strength are we talking about?

2. Start, stop, continue

Performance reviews are continued throughout the year, not only with answers from colleagues, but also from clients, project staff, customers, etc. on the following review questions. This gives the employee starting points to further improve their performance:

What should I especially continue doing?
What should I show more often?
What should I stop doing?

Another variant is giving tops and tips. Below are two example questions:

Can you give me a top? 'You do well, I appreciate in your behavior and attitude, you should do more, more often, longer'.
Can you give me a tip? 'I miss this, this takes too long, too short. This is an area for improvement'.

Employees truly become happy from development and making progress. Experiencing growth is the happiest moment of the workday according to research.
(Kilian Wawoe, assistant professor Human Resources Management at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

3. Self-evaluation performance

With the questions below, employees can hold up a mirror to themselves and improve their performance:

Have I done the right things and am I doing the right things well? Where is the evidence?
What went well in the past period and where is the evidence?
When did I exceed the expectations of a client or colleague?

Instead of a one-sided performance review where the manager evaluates employees' performance with letters (A = poor and E = excellent) using a checklist-like form (quality, verbal expression skills), employees evaluate their own performance, with or without input from others, and make continuous improvement agreements with themselves and/or their manager.

4. Evaluating work happiness

Assignment:

You don't become truly happy by focusing on your shortcomings and working hard on them. That is classical psychology where the emphasis is always on the negative. People generally don't feel better from that. You can start feeling better by finding out what your qualities are and using them for something bigger than yourself. Think about the answers to the following questions: