Questions to Ask During a Performance Review
Performance review questions for managers: seven core questions, categorized examples by topic, questions to avoid, and how to structure the conversation.
Questions to Ask During a Performance Review
What to ask your employees, and how to run the conversation when you are the owner and the manager
I once ran a review where I did almost all of the talking. I had prepared thoroughly, I had examples, and I delivered a clear and fair assessment for about forty minutes. The person nodded, agreed with everything, and thanked me. Two months later they resigned, and in the exit conversation they told me about a problem with how work was being assigned that had been building for most of a year. I had asked them nothing that would have surfaced it.
That is what bad review questions cost. Not an awkward meeting, but a conversation where the only information flowing is from you to them, and the thing you most needed to know never comes up.
Most articles on this topic are written for the employee, giving them questions to ask their boss. This one is the other side: you are the owner or the manager, you are running the review, and you need to know what to actually ask. It covers the seven questions that cover most reviews, categorized questions to pull from when a specific situation calls for it, the ones that reliably produce nothing, and how to structure the conversation so people talk. Written for businesses of 5 to 50 where you are both the manager and whatever HR exists. I built FirstHR for companies at exactly that stage.
What the Questions Are Actually For
At a large company the review is partly an information-gathering exercise, because the manager may genuinely not know what someone has been working on. At a fifteen-person business you already know. You have seen the work. This changes what the questions are for.
What you do not know, and what the questions have to extract, falls into three categories. What is harder than it should be, because friction is invisible from the outside and people absorb it silently. What they want, because you have probably assumed and may have assumed wrong. And what they need from you, because that is the one thing they will almost never volunteer.
The Seven Core Questions
If you use nothing else from this guide, use these. They work for almost any employee at almost any small business, and they are ordered deliberately.
The ordering matters more than the specific wording. Opening with what they are proud of does two things: it starts the meeting with them speaking, and it tells you what they value about their own work, which is frequently different from what you would have highlighted. That gap is information.
Question 2 is the one that changes the meeting. Asking what did not go well before you deliver your assessment means most people will raise the thing you were going to raise. When they get there first, the conversation becomes joint problem-solving rather than a judgment being handed down. On the rare occasions they miss it entirely, that is also useful to know.
Question 5 is the one managers skip, and the skip is usually unconscious. It gets asked as a throwaway at the end when everyone is ready to leave. Ask it in the middle, with time left, and then tolerate the silence. The first answer is often nothing, and the second answer, if you wait, is the real one.
Structuring the Conversation
Questions alone do not make a good review. The sequence and the balance of airtime do most of the work.
The rough target for airtime: they should talk more than you. If you spoke for forty of sixty minutes, you delivered a briefing. This is harder than it sounds because you have prepared and they have not, and the natural gravity of the conversation pulls toward you filling space.
On the surprise question, which is the most important structural principle: if anything in the review is genuinely new to the person, the failure happened in the preceding six months, not in the meeting. Reviews should be a summary of an ongoing conversation. The one-on-one guide covers the cadence that makes this true, and the performance review guide covers the full process the conversation sits inside.
Questions About the Past Period
Pull from these when the core seven need supplementing, or when a specific situation calls for more depth on what happened.
| Question | When to use it | What it surfaces |
|---|---|---|
| What are you most proud of from this period? | Every review, as the opener | What they value in their own work, which is often not what you would have named |
| Walk me through what happened with [specific project]. | When something went wrong and you want the account | The sequence of events without the defensiveness that why questions produce |
| What would you do differently if you started that again? | After a project that underdelivered | Whether they have already done the reflection, which tells you a lot |
| What is something you did that I probably did not notice? | Every review, and it works better than it sounds | Invisible work, which is chronically undercounted at small companies |
| Which part of your work do you think has improved most? | For someone in a growth phase | Their sense of their own trajectory, and whether it matches yours |
| What did you learn this period that changed how you work? | For experienced employees | Whether they are still developing or coasting on existing skill |
The fourth question in that table is worth using consistently. At a small business a great deal of work is genuinely invisible: the customer someone talked down, the error caught before it shipped, the process quietly fixed. People rarely mention it unprompted because it does not feel like an achievement. Asking directly produces answers that change your assessment.
Questions About What Gets in the Way
This category produces the highest yield per question and is the most commonly missing from review templates. You are looking for friction the person has stopped noticing because they have adapted to it.
| Question | What it surfaces |
|---|---|
| What part of your job takes more time or effort than it should? | Process problems disguised as performance problems. Often fixable in an afternoon once named |
| What do you spend time on that you do not think matters? | Work that has outlived its purpose, which nobody cancels because nobody notices |
| Where do you find yourself waiting on someone else? | Handoff and dependency problems, which are invisible from any single vantage point |
| What do you not have that would make this easier? | Tools, information, access, or authority. The answers are frequently cheap |
| What decision do you bring to me that you think you should be able to make yourself? | Whether you are the bottleneck, which at small scale you often are |
| Is there anything you have been avoiding telling me? | Ask it plainly, then wait. Uncomfortable and occasionally the most valuable minute of the review |
The fifth question deserves particular attention if you are the owner. Founders systematically underestimate how much decision-making funnels through them and how much waiting that creates. The answer to this question is frequently a small change in delegation that saves the person hours a week. The people management guide covers this pattern in more depth.
Questions About Growth
Development conversations at small businesses are harder than the literature suggests, because there is often nowhere obvious to promote someone. The honest response is to talk about scope and skill rather than titles, and to be direct when a title is not available.
| Question | Why it works at small scale |
|---|---|
| What would you like to be doing more of, and less of? | Concrete and immediately actionable, unlike abstract career questions. The answers are often small adjustments |
| What would need to change for you to take on more responsibility? | Puts the requirement in specific terms rather than treating advancement as something that just happens |
| Is there a part of the business you would like to understand better? | At small scale cross-functional exposure is easy to arrange and genuinely developmental |
| Who here would you like to learn from? | Internal mentoring costs nothing and works. People usually have a specific answer |
| What skill would make the biggest difference to your work in the next year? | Focuses development on capability rather than on courses |
| If you could redesign your role, what would it look like? | At a fifteen-person company this is a real question, not a hypothetical. Roles are negotiable |
Be honest when there is no promotion available. Saying there is no manager role to give you in the next year, and here is what I can offer instead is respected far more than vague encouragement that everyone understands to be empty. The career development guide covers structuring what you offer instead, and the skills assessment guide covers identifying what capability to build.
Questions That Turn It Around
Asking employees to evaluate your management in the same conversation where you evaluate their performance is structurally awkward. The power difference does not disappear because you asked nicely. But the questions below get closer to honest answers than a general request for feedback does.
| Question | Why this framing helps |
|---|---|
| What do you need from me that you are not getting? | Points at a specific gap rather than inviting a judgment of you as a manager |
| What should I have told you sooner? | Presupposes that you got something wrong, which makes it safe to answer |
| When have I been unclear about what I wanted? | Specific and about a behavior rather than about you as a person |
| What would make our one-on-ones more useful? | Small, concrete, and low stakes. Frequently produces a real answer on the first ask |
| Is there feedback you have wanted to give me and have not? | Direct. Expect nothing the first two times and something real the third |
Expect this to take a few cycles. The first time you ask, the answer will be nothing, you are great, and that is a reasonable response from someone who does not yet know what happens when they say something real. What determines whether the third answer is honest is what you visibly do with the second. Act on one piece of feedback publicly and the pattern changes.
For a more structured version once the team is larger, the 360 feedback guide covers collecting input from multiple directions.
Questions About the Team and the Business
These treat the employee as someone with a view worth hearing rather than only as a subject being assessed. At small scale this is both true and useful.
| Question | What it produces |
|---|---|
| What is one thing we should change about how the team works? | Process improvements from the person closest to the work |
| What should we stop doing entirely? | The stop question outperforms the start question and almost nobody asks it |
| Who on the team has been doing well that I might not have noticed? | Visibility on contributions you cannot see, and it tells you about the person answering |
| What do customers tell you that they do not tell me? | For anyone customer-facing, frequently the most commercially valuable answer in the review |
| If you were running this business, what would you do differently? | Ambitious question that produces surprisingly grounded answers from operational staff |
The fourth question is worth asking of every customer-facing employee every time. Customers tell the person who serves them things they would never tell the owner, and that information usually never travels. A review is one of the few structured moments where you can ask for it.
Questions That Predict Departure
Asking whether someone is happy produces one socially safe answer. These get closer to the truth by asking about conditions rather than feelings.
| Question | What a concerning answer looks like |
|---|---|
| What would make you want to still be here in two years? | A vague answer, or conditions you know you cannot meet |
| What is the best part of working here right now? | Difficulty naming anything, or naming only the people rather than the work |
| If you were approached by another company tomorrow, what would make you listen? | Blunt, and people answer it more honestly than the happiness question |
| Is there anything about how we work that frustrates you regularly? | A long pause followed by nothing usually means yes and they have decided it is not worth raising |
| What would have to change for this to be the best job you have had? | Aspirational framing that produces specific answers about what is currently missing |
These questions work best in a review where you have already demonstrated you can hear something uncomfortable. Asked in a meeting that has otherwise been a one-way assessment, they read as a test. Asked after a genuine conversation, they get real answers.
The broader point: the review is where a retention problem becomes visible if you ask the right way, and where it stays invisible if you do not. The retention guide covers what to do with what you learn.
Adjusting by Situation
The core questions work broadly, but emphasis should shift depending on who you are talking to.
| Situation | Where to put the weight | Question to lead with |
|---|---|---|
| Strong performer, wants more | Development and scope, honestly including what is not available | What would need to change for you to take on more responsibility? |
| Strong performer, content where they are | Retention and recognition. Do not manufacture ambition they do not have | What would make you want to still be here in two years? |
| Solid but plateaued | Obstacles and interest. Plateaus are often boredom or friction rather than capability | What part of your job takes more effort than it should? |
| Struggling | Cause, not judgment. Distinguish skill, process, resourcing, and fit | What do you think is getting in the way? |
| New, first review after onboarding | Clarity and setup rather than performance verdicts | What did you have to figure out yourself that nobody told you? |
| Long tenure, changed role | Whether the new shape of the job actually fits them | How is the job different from what you expected when it changed? |
The struggling case deserves emphasis because it is where reviews most often go wrong. The instinct is to lead with the problem, which produces defensiveness in the first minute and closes the rest of the conversation. Leading with what is getting in the way gets you the same information with the person as a participant rather than a defendant. If the conversation is heading toward a formal process, the performance improvement plan guide covers the mechanics, and the difficult conversations guide covers the delivery.
For a first review after onboarding, the emphasis on setup rather than verdict matters. Someone four months in who is struggling frequently has an onboarding problem rather than a performance problem. The new employee review guide covers that specific conversation.
Questions to Avoid
Two categories: questions that create legal exposure, and questions that consume time while producing nothing usable.
On the legal side, the boundary is whether the question relates to the work. In a small company where you know about someone's family and health because you talk to them every day, the drift into these topics is easy and rarely malicious. It is still exposure. Guidance for smaller employers is available through the EEOC small business resources and the list of prohibited practices.
The Follow-Up That Matters
The difference between a review that produces something and one that does not is usually a single behavior: what you do when the first answer is thin.
Most people give a short, safe answer to the first version of any question. What is harder than it should be gets a shrug and a nothing really. The manager who moves on to the next question runs a forty-minute meeting that produces nothing. The manager who says something like: I ask because I noticed the monthly report seems to take you most of a day, is that about right, gets the real answer.
Three follow-ups that do most of the work. Can you give me an example, which converts a general statement into something actionable. What would that look like specifically, which converts a complaint into a proposal. And what else, asked after they have finished, which is where the second and more honest answer frequently arrives.
Silence is the fourth tool and the hardest to use. After you ask something that matters, the pause before the real answer is often five or six seconds, which feels much longer than it is. Filling it with a rephrase or a reassurance is the most common way managers talk themselves out of the answer they wanted. The feedback guide covers the conversational mechanics in more depth.
What to Write Down
A half page, written the same day, shared with the person. Not a form, not a rating matrix, and not nothing, which is what most small businesses actually produce.
| What to record | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The specific examples you discussed, with dates | Turns a conversation into a record. Matters considerably if performance later becomes a formal issue |
| What they said about obstacles | The thing you are most likely to forget and most likely to be able to fix |
| The two or three agreed actions, with owners and dates | Without this the review produces nothing. This is the operative part of the document |
| What you committed to do | Holds you accountable to the person, which they will notice either way |
| What they said they want next | So you are not guessing about their ambitions six months later |
Sharing the notes matters as much as writing them. It gives the person a chance to correct a misunderstanding while it is still cheap, and it removes the ambiguity about what was agreed that otherwise surfaces months later as a disagreement. The employee review form template gives you a starting structure, and the personnel file guide covers what belongs in an employee record.
Common Mistakes
These recur across small businesses, and most are not about the questions themselves but about how the conversation is run.
The costliest is the first: saving feedback for the review. Everything else on this list is recoverable within a single conversation. Saving up six months of observations means the review is where someone learns for the first time that something has been wrong since March, which is a failure of the six months rather than of the meeting. Guidance from SHRM on managing employee performance covers the ongoing practice this sits within.
How FirstHR Fits
FirstHR handles the layer around the conversation: employee records so review notes live with everything else about a person rather than in a folder somewhere, document management so what you agreed in March is findable in September, and structured onboarding so new hires arrive with clear expectations that the first review can actually reference. It is built for businesses of 5 to 50 people at flat-fee pricing.
What software does not do is have the conversation. Good reviews come from asking better questions, tolerating silence, and writing down what you agreed. A system makes the follow-through survive: the actions have somewhere to live, and the next review starts from the last one rather than from memory.
General guidance for smaller employers on managing people is available through the SBA business guide. For writing up the review itself, the performance review writing guide covers the document, and the performance management guide covers the system the reviews sit inside.
Frequently Asked Questions
What questions should a manager ask during a performance review?
Seven questions cover most reviews. What are you most proud of from this period? What did not go the way you wanted? What part of your job takes more time or effort than it should? What would you like to be doing more of, and less of? What do you need from me that you are not getting? What is one thing we should change about how the team works? Where do you want to be a year from now? Ask them roughly in that order, because starting with the employee’s view rather than your assessment changes the tone of everything that follows.
How long should a performance review take?
Forty-five to sixty minutes for most employees at a small business. Shorter than that and you are delivering a verdict rather than having a conversation. Much longer and it becomes exhausting for both people and the useful content is usually in the first hour anyway. A rough split that works: ten minutes of them talking first, fifteen of your assessment, fifteen looking forward, and the remainder on whatever the conversation actually needs.
Should I send performance review questions in advance?
Yes. Sending the questions a week ahead produces substantially better answers, because people have time to think rather than improvising under pressure. It also reduces the anxiety that makes reviews unpleasant, since the employee knows what is coming. The one thing not to send in advance is your assessment of them, which should be delivered in person so you can discuss it rather than having them read it alone and form conclusions.
What should you not ask in a performance review?
Avoid anything touching protected characteristics: family plans, health, age, religion, or national origin. These create legal exposure and have no place in a performance conversation regardless of how warmly they are meant, and in a small company where people know each other socially the drift into them is easy. Also avoid questions that produce no usable information, such as where do you see yourself in five years, what is your greatest weakness, and are you happy here. Each has one socially safe answer that everyone gives.
How do I start a performance review conversation?
Start with them talking, not with your assessment. Open with what they are most proud of from the period, then what did not go the way they wanted. This does two things: it gives you their self-assessment before you anchor them with yours, and it changes the emotional shape of the meeting from a verdict being delivered to a conversation being had. Most people are harder on themselves than you were planning to be, which makes the critical part of the conversation considerably easier.
What are good open-ended performance review questions?
The most productive open-ended questions ask about specifics rather than generalities. What part of your job takes more time than it should. Walk me through what happened with a particular project. What would need to change for you to take on more responsibility. What is one thing we should stop doing. Each invites a concrete answer. Avoid open-ended questions so broad that they produce a summary, such as how do you think the year went, since the answer is usually a paragraph of nothing.
Should I ask employees for feedback on my own management?
Yes, and expect it to take a few cycles before the answers get honest. Asking what do you need from me that you are not getting is more productive than asking how am I doing as a manager, because it points at something specific and actionable rather than inviting a judgment of you. Whatever you hear, respond to it visibly at least once. Nothing kills candor faster than asking for feedback and then doing nothing observable with it.
How many questions should a performance review include?
Six to eight in the conversation itself. More than that and you are working through a form rather than talking, and the answers get shorter as the list gets longer. Longer question banks are useful as a menu to select from based on the specific person and situation, not as a script to work through. The quality of a review is determined by the follow-up questions you ask, which only happens if you have left room for them.
What questions should I ask a struggling employee in a review?
Focus on cause rather than judgment. What do you think is getting in the way. Was there a point where this started being difficult. What would need to be true for this to work. Do you have what you need to do this job well. These questions distinguish between a skill gap, a process problem, a resourcing issue, and a fit problem, which require completely different responses. Avoid opening with why did you not do X, which produces defensiveness in the first minute and closes the rest of the conversation.
How is a performance review different at a small business?
Three practical differences. You already know the answers to many factual questions, so the value is in the forward-looking and obstacle-focused parts rather than in information gathering. There is often nowhere obvious to promote someone, so development conversations need to be about scope and skill rather than titles. And the relationship is closer, which makes honest criticism harder to deliver and more important, since there is no HR layer to absorb it and no distance to hide behind.
Should performance reviews and salary discussions happen together?
Ideally separate them, or handle pay as a clear statement at the very end. Once compensation enters the conversation, people stop processing anything else, which means your development feedback lands in a room where nobody is listening. If you cannot separate them, say the number plainly rather than hinting at it, and do it after the development discussion rather than before or during.
How often should small businesses run performance reviews?
Twice a year works well for most small businesses, supported by regular one-on-ones in between. Annual reviews put too much weight on a single conversation and rely on memory that has faded. Quarterly formal reviews are usually more overhead than a small team can sustain. What matters more than the cadence is that nothing in the formal review is a surprise, which depends on the conversations happening between reviews rather than on the reviews themselves.