Nobody enjoys being judged. Every year, many employees call in sick when their performance review is due. However, the flip side is that managers often dread delivering negative feedback too. As a rule, we prefer sharing good news over bad. To make the process easier for you as a manager, here are the best tips for preparing and conducting your employees' annual performance review!
A performance review is a formal evaluation of an employee’s job performance. It’s a chance for managers and employees to discuss achievements, areas for improvement, and future goals. Rather than being just a “once-a-year” event, reviews are an opportunity to realign expectations, provide feedback, and foster growth.
The performance review should be a constructive, two-way conversation where both you and the employee leave with a clearer understanding of what’s working well and where to focus efforts moving forward.
Clarify Expectations: Ensure your employees understand their role and what is expected of them.
Recognize Achievements: Celebrate successes to keep your team motivated.
Identify Improvement Areas: Offer constructive feedback to help employees grow.
Set Future Goals: Align their goals with the company’s strategic objectives.
Enhance Engagement: Performance reviews show employees that their work matters and that you care about their growth.
The foundation of any great performance review is accurate, relevant data. Without this, feedback can feel subjective and unbalanced. To ensure your review is objective, you need to base it on performance metrics. This is where Jira, the popular project management and issue-tracking platform, is key.
If you’re already using Jira to manage your team’s tasks and workflows, you’re in luck. With Report Builder for Jira, you can pull detailed, data-driven reports that capture productivity, quality, collaboration, and more—giving you a clear picture of each employee’s performance.
Feedback should be specific and actionable. Start with positive feedback to motivate your employee, then move to areas for improvement, always offering suggestions for development. Use examples from the data you’ve gathered to support your points.
Performance reviews are most effective when they’re not one-sided. Ask employees for their input on what’s working well, where they feel they need support, and their goals for the future. This approach will help you foster open communication and trust.
End the performance review by setting clear, measurable, and actionable goals. Use the SMART framework – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound – to help employees understand exactly what they need to focus on and by when.
To conduct a successful performance review, preparation is key. Since subjective impressions can often be misleading, it’s best to ground your feedback in data. If your company uses Jira for project management, or even Jira Service Management, you’re already on the right track. With the right tools, you can easily assess your employees’ performance directly from their Jira tickets, providing you with a solid, objective foundation for your review.
Now, we want to show you how to use Report Builder for Jira to prepare the best for your review.
Report Builder is the ultimate solution for enhancing Jira’s reporting capabilities, allowing you to transform your Jira data into clear, actionable insights. Whether you’re using Jira on Cloud or Data Center, Report Builder helps you go beyond the limitations of Jira’s default reports.
With Report Builder, you get the best of both worlds:
Easy-to-use templates: Create reports quickly with pre-built templates and an intuitive editor.
Advanced customization: For power users, you can build reports using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Real-time reporting
Powerful dashboards
Self-service custom reports
Customizable metrics and visualizations
Advanced BI tools
Now that you understand the importance of data-driven performance reviews, let’s explore how Report Builder can help you gather meaningful insights from Jira. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to make the most of it.
The first step in preparing for a performance review is deciding what metrics to focus on. Here are some common ones you can track using Report Builder for Jira:
Productivity: How much work is getting done? Measure metrics like tasks completed, time logged, and adherence to deadlines.
Quality of Work: Are they delivering high-quality results? Track error rates, rework instances, and client satisfaction.
Efficiency: How effectively are they working? Look at utilization rates, cycle times, and throughput.
Collaboration: Are they contributing to team success? Track things like cross-team involvement, mentoring hours, and feedback quality.
Learning & Development: Are they growing? Measure skills acquired, training hours, and knowledge sharing.
Customer Impact: How are they contributing to customer success? Track customer satisfaction scores, complaint resolution times, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Leadership: Are they showing leadership potential? Measure project leadership, decision-making accuracy, and stakeholder alignment.
By defining the right metrics, you can create tailored reports that suit your needs. Let’s explore some examples of how to gather data when using Jira Service Management (JSM) along with Report Builder.
Why JSM? While you can certainly pull Jira data directly with Report Builder, JSM offers the best default issue fields, providing truly measurable metrics.
Now, let’s take a look at a few examples.
To create a productivity report for your employees, navigate to Apps > Report Builder > Create Report > Universal Report.
To assess productivity, you can, for instance, count the number of issues. Simply select the JSM project you wish to analyze in the Scope field. The system will then calculate how many issues have been completed, how many are still pending, and how many are currently in progress.
You can also filter the data by specific issue types.
Navigate to the Universal Report as described above. Then, you can again define the scope you want to measure, set the desired chart type and define rows, colums and measures.
To best display the quality of work in a JSM project, we filter for
Projects
Assignees
Sentiment
Count of Issues
The result can look like this:
Data truly becomes valuable when it’s compared to other data. Report Builder makes it easy for you to create team performance reports – no coding skills required.
You can monitor overall team performance by adding Report Builder reports as Jira gadgets to your dashboard. For example, the “Team Performance Review” gadget can display a custom report that tracks key metrics. The “Utilization” gadget allows you to view time logged across projects, while the “Workload” gadget helps you compare the workload distribution among team members. You can also add gadgets that show general performance metrics across different projects, such as the number of issues created and resolved by the team.
To analyze your gadgets better, simply hit maximize.
The type of reporting you create depends on the data you track in Jira (or JSM). For example, let’s say you track team collaboration by including the term “Mentorship” in the issue descriptions. In that case, you can filter for descriptions containing “Mentorship” in the Universal Report. You can also add columns for assignees and time tracked, allowing you to easily visualize collaboration across your team.
It’s not just customer appointments that matter; internal activities like training sessions also contribute to your employees’ development. These should be taken into account during the annual performance review. For instance, if you have an issue type called “Training,” you can easily filter by this issue type to track and evaluate these activities.
You can also compare training hours vs mentorship hours, adding Report Builder gadget to your Jira Dashboard.
Another way to analyze your team’s overall performance is by using Report Builder.
As you can see, no matter what metrics you use to assess your employees’ performance and provide constructive feedback, Report Builder offers endless possibilities for customization and insight.
Performance reviews should always be data-driven. This helps ensure fairness and clarity. Tools like Jira and Report Builder make it easy to gather meaningful insights. You can track productivity, collaboration, and development — all the key areas that matter.
But remember, data alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Performance reviews are about people, not just numbers. Not everything can be measured by a Jira report. Motivation, teamwork, and personal growth are harder to quantify but just as important.
In the end, performance reviews don’t have to be stressful. With the right approach, they can be an opportunity for growth and alignment. Keep it data-driven, but remember you’re working with humans.
