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Year-End Reviews: Best Practices, Sample End of The Year Review Questions + Free Template
Updated on:
December 12, 2025
Year-end reviews are the perfect time to reflect on performance, celebrate progress, and plan for the year ahead. In this article, we’ll share example questions and a practical year-end review template to help you make the most of the process.
A year end review is a structure evaluation format of an employee's performance over the last work year. It's a great opportunity to take time and reflect on accomplishments, challenges as well as any areas of improvement.
In that regard, these reviews typically involve discussions on goal achievements, skill development and feedback for further growth. A well conducted year end review hence helps align employees with company objectives and foster professional development.
Follow along as we go through the steps of how you can create a review template that is comprehensive enough for impactful insights for your employees.
Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with the review is a must. This simple piece of information will give you the direction you need in order to reach actionable feedback. Is it to assess overall performance for example? Or are you looking to identify growth areas,, or set future goals? Understanding your purpose with the review with clarity, will ensure that the review aligns with your overall objectives as an entity.
To be a comprehensive year-end review, your assessment should include the following key areas:
Gathering meaningful feedback happens only through meaningful questions. So, to ensure impactful results, you could try asking questions like;
These questions will bring valuable insights to the surface and help create a more meaningful assessment period. We will have more questions like this below our article as well!
Make sure to end the review with a section for setting clear, measurable professional goals for the year ahead. At the end of the day, no review cycle is static. The whole idea behind them is to create a space that is reflective enough so that you can evolve through your findings. In that sense, setting new objectives for the new year, will allow your employees to have a sense of direction and a clear roadmap for the future. You can also opt for designing performance improvement plans while you're at it as well!
Following these simple yet effective steps will allow you to prepare appropriately for year-end reviews and get the most out of the insights your workforce has to offer in order for you to prepare for the next year, setting yourself up for success!
This year-end review template is provided in Word format, making it easy to edit and customize based on your team’s needs. The layout is simple and clearly structured, allowing both managers and employees to focus on the conversation rather than the format itself.
This template works best for:
The template includes dedicated sections to help guide a complete year-end evaluation, such as:
You can utilize this template in a variety of ways, as your team needs it and even customize it as necessary.
We also have examples of different year-end review questions you can choose from right in this article.
Using a structured year-end review template helps keep evaluations clear and consistent. This template allows you to save time, ensure important topics aren’t overlooked, and create space for more thoughtful feedback and goal-setting.
Most importantly, it supports constructive conversations that help employees understand where they stand and how they can grow in the year ahead.
By now we've already established why a year end review is so important but let's list of its benefits;
A year-end review is crucial for both employees and organizations as they help provide a structured opportunity to assess performance and set goals, fostering growth and development in the process.
They are the perfect time for performance reflection, goal alignment, constructive feedback, recognition and motivation ad well as invest time in career development while there is dedicated space to do so.
Why Microsoft Teams specifically? Because it is one of the if not most versatile collaboration and communication platforms for organizations regardless of whether they are remote or not.
When conducting performance reviews, however, Teams isn’t enough on its own. That is why we will be taking advantage of the best performance review software in the Microsoft Teams ecosystem: Teamflect.
So let’s fire up Microsoft Teams and explain step by step how you can use Teamflect to conduct annual reviews.
Teamflect’s “Reviews” module is rather easy to navigate. In order to send an annual performance review template out to your employees. All you need to do is enter the reviews module as shown below and click “New Review” to initiate a brand new performance review.
The reviews module is home to all the performance reviews about you and your team:
Teamflect has an extensive library of performance review templates for you to choose from. While they are ready to be used as is, you can always customize them to fit your organization’s needs.
Some of the ways you can customize Teamflect’s review templates include:
Once you send out your annual performance review templates, all that is left to do is to fill them out. If you’ve included a self-review section, the reviewee will have to submit their self-review as well. Both parties can fill out the performance review template without having to leave Microsoft Teams.
Teamflect allows users to automate review cycles at their desired frequencies. While we’ve shown you the manual way of starting a review cycle above, automating period-based performance reviews such as 30-60-90 day reviews or in this particular case, annual reviews is always the best possible practice.
Teamflect users have the option to create custom automation scenarios for any performance review template of their choice.
Automating period-based performance reviews both saves leaders a lot of time and effort, and reduces the risk of making any mistakes while conducting annual reviews.
You can start conducting your performance reviews inside Microsoft Teams by clicking the button below!
This section is dedicated to highlighting your proudest achievements over the past year. With such questions, you'll be able to understand your top successes, projects where you excelled, and how your work has positively impacted the team or organization as a whole.
In this part, the questions will assess the goals set at the start of the year and your progress toward them. It’s important to understand challenges you faced in order to plan ahead later on.
This section explores the steps you’ve taken to improve your skills and any plans for future growth. In order to support your continuous development and identify training opportunities, such questions will be a great aid.
Here, we focus on understanding the significant challenges you faced during the year and areas that might need improvement. These types of questions help provide better support and strategize for success.
Effective communication and teamwork are key to long-term success. This section reviews how well you collaborated with colleagues, any successes in teamwork, and challenges faced in relationships throughout the year.
This set of questions evaluate how you managed your workload and productivity. Sharing strategies that worked and areas for improvement helps in setting better practices for the future.
Feedback is crucial for continuous improvement and organizational growth. This section allows you to share your thoughts on the organization and identify areas where you need more support or feedback.
Work-life balance is the key that ties it all together. So, this section focuses on understanding current satisfaction levels and identifying ways to improve well-being within the company.
This section discusses your long-term aspirations and how your current role fits into them. These questions aim to understand career trajectories and provide necessary support for advancement along the way.
Looking ahead, this section will help set a roadmap for success in the coming year, outlining your expectations and how the company can support your goals.
A year end review should include key aspects of performance such as goal achievements and other key accomplishments within the year. In that regard, it should also include key challenges that were faced in the same period.
Within that period, it's important to consider the skills developed as well as how collaboration played a part in team efforts overall. A well constructed year-end review should also include space for feedback on growth areas and goal setting for the year ahead.
At the end of the day, the year-end review process, a critical component of employee engagement, can be effectively streamlined using a comprehensive “End of Year Review Template.” This template serves as a guiding framework for both managers and employees, ensuring thorough and meaningful “Year End Performance Reviews.”
By reflecting on the past year using a structured “Year in Review Template,” organizations can facilitate constructive discussions, recognize achievements, and set goals for the upcoming year. Implementing these practices enhances the overall effectiveness of “End of Year Reviews,” contributing to a more engaged and productive team.
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