--- title: "Performance Management Policy Template — What to Include | Crewmojo" description: "The questions your performance policy has to answer, section by section. Answer them in order and you have a policy people can actually use. Take it and change it." source: https://www.crewmojo.com/performance-management-templates/performance-management-policy published: 2022-12-02 modified: 2026-10-12 generated: 2026-11-04 --- [All templates](https://www.crewmojo.com/performance-management-templates) # Performance management policy template The questions your performance policy has to answer, section by section. Answer them in order and you have a policy people can actually use. Take it and change it. 20 questions · Performance reviews ## The template ### Purpose Two or three sentences. If this section is hard to write, the rest of the policy will describe a process nobody can justify. 1. What is performance management here actually for? 2. What does this organisation believe about how people do their best work? 3. Who does this policy apply to, and does anything differ for probation, fixed-term or contract? ### Setting expectations 1. How does someone find out what is expected of them? 2. Who sets goals, and how often are they revisited? 3. How do individual goals connect to what the organisation is trying to do? ### Ongoing conversations The section most policies leave out, and the one describing what happens for fifty weeks of the year. 1. How often should a manager and team member meet one-to-one, and whose job is it to book it? 2. How does feedback work here — who can give it, to whom, and when? 3. What support does someone get if they are struggling before it becomes a formal issue? ### Reviewing performance 1. What happens in a review, how often, and who is involved? 2. What information does a review draw on, and where does it come from? 3. Are ratings used? If so, what do they mean and who sees them? 4. How does a review connect to pay, promotion or progression — and if it does not, say so plainly ### When performance falls short Be specific here. Vagueness in this section is what gets organisations into trouble, in both directions. 1. What is the difference between a supportive conversation and a formal process, and what triggers the move? 2. What are the steps, how long does each take, and what support is offered at each? 3. What is the right of reply, and who can someone bring with them? 4. Who signs off on each stage? ### Fairness and governance 1. How do you check the process is being applied consistently across teams? 2. What can someone do if they think their review was unfair? 3. Who owns this policy, and when is it next reviewed? ## What this one assumes There is more than one way to run this. Here is what we assumed, so you can tell quickly whether it fits — and what to change if it does not. - The policy is written for everyone in the organisation, not for HR and not for the lawyers - It describes how performance works here all year, with managing underperformance as one section rather than the whole document - Someone owns it and reviews it annually — an unowned policy is out of date within a cycle - Anything you cannot answer honestly stays out until you can ## What a performance policy is for Most performance policies are written for a disciplinary process and then filed. They come out when somebody is in trouble, which teaches the whole organisation that performance management is what happens when things go wrong. A policy that gets used describes how performance works here all year — how expectations are set, how conversations happen, how reviews run — with underperformance as one section rather than the purpose of the document. This template is a set of questions rather than wording to copy, for a reason. A policy copied from elsewhere describes someone else's organisation, and people notice. Answer these in order and you will have a policy that matches how you actually work. ## Working through it **Purpose** is the hardest section and worth the time. If you cannot say in three sentences what performance management is for here, the process you describe afterwards will not be defensible to anyone asked to follow it. **Setting expectations** and **ongoing conversations** are the two sections most policies skip, and between them they cover almost the entire year. The question about whose job it is to book the one-to-one looks trivial and is not — it is the single most common reason regular conversations quietly stop. **Reviewing performance** contains the question organisations most often dodge: whether reviews affect pay. Say it either way. People assume a connection whether or not one exists, and an unstated link is worse than an explicit one. **When performance falls short** is where precision protects everybody. The trigger between a supportive conversation and a formal process is the part people most need to understand, and the part most policies leave to interpretation. **Fairness and governance** is short and almost always missing. An appeal route and a named owner are what turn a policy from a document into something with authority behind it. ## Keeping it usable Write it for the person being managed. If a new starter cannot read it and understand what will happen to them and when, it is not finished, however legally sound it is. Say what actually happens, not what you intend to happen. A policy describing quarterly reviews in an organisation that runs them annually is worse than having no policy, because it tells people the document is fiction. Date it and name an owner on the first page. Policies without either drift for years past the point they describe anything real. ## What we would change, and when For a small organisation, merge reviewing performance and when performance falls short into one section and keep the whole thing to two pages. A long policy in a company of thirty people goes unread, and length is not what makes it defensible. If you operate across jurisdictions, the underperformance section is the one that cannot be shared — notice periods, consultation requirements and rights of reply differ. Keep one policy and vary that section by location rather than writing several whole policies. If you are replacing a policy that was only ever used for discipline, say so in the introduction. People read a new policy through their experience of the old one, and naming the change is the only way to shift that. ## Run this one, then change it Load it into Crewmojo as a starting point and reshape the questions, the timing and who is involved around how your organisation actually works. [Book a demo](https://www.crewmojo.com/demo)