Annual reviews require you to look back across an entire year of management activity. Manager Toolkit stores everything you need in one place, making year-end preparation far less painful than piecing together scattered notes and emails.
Step-by-Step Preparation
Filter catchups by date range. Open the team member's catchup history and look at conversations from the full review year. Skim through discussion notes for major themes, achievements, concerns, and turning points. Note any particularly significant conversations.
Review the sentiment journey. Look at the sentiment trend over the full twelve months. Identify periods of high and low sentiment. Consider what was happening at those times - project changes, team shifts, personal circumstances. This gives you a nuanced understanding of the person's experience across the year.
Count completed actions. Review actions for this team member across the year. How many were completed? How many were overdue before completion? Were there patterns - for example, consistently completing actions on time early in the year but slipping later? Action data tells a story about workload and reliability.
Check target outcomes. List all targets that were active during the year and their final status: achieved, partially met, missed, or cancelled. For each target, note the context - was it ambitious from the start, were there external blockers, did the goalposts shift? Targets are your clearest evidence of performance against agreed goals.
Gather survey feedback. If you ran any surveys during the year that included feedback about or from this team member, review the results. Anonymous survey data can surface perspectives that do not come through in one-to-one conversations.
Review key themes. Check which key themes are most associated with this person over the year. Themes like "leadership development", "technical growth", or "communication challenges" provide narrative threads that help structure the review conversation.
Compiling Into a Narrative
With all this data gathered, organise your notes into a year-end narrative:
- Highlights - the most significant achievements, positive sentiment periods, and completed targets
- Challenges - difficult periods, missed targets, recurring concerns from catchups
- Growth - areas where the person has visibly developed over the year
- Focus for next year - development areas, new targets, and changes to ways of working
Pro
Use the AI summary feature on the team member's profile to generate an automated overview of their year. This can serve as a useful starting point before you add your own context and judgement.
Start year-end preparation at least two weeks before the review conversation. Rushing through a year of data the night before leads to a shallow, recent-biased review. Give yourself time to reflect properly.
Making It a Two-Way Conversation
Share your preparation themes with the team member before the review, or ask them to prepare their own highlights and challenges. When both sides come prepared with evidence, the conversation is more productive and feels fairer.
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