Shishir's Practical Guide to Performance Calibration Meetings

This performance review template is the culmination of various methods and techniques I have utilized on my teams. Over the course of the past two decades, I have participated in, created, and re-created dozens of performance calibration processes.

This activity can be simultaneously one of the most dreaded and most valuable exercises a group can go through. And a critical portion of this process is the Performance Calibration meeting - where a set of supervisors come together to discuss the performance of employees and achieve agreement on performance appraisal ratings.

Here are the 6 approaches to calibration you can use in this template:

1. Simple - When a team is small enough to just linearly run through the list, this is a simple framework for calibration. You can filter by level, manager, etc or just go straight through.
2. Values Centered - Define a set of criteria to evaluate on, then use that set to determine a final rating
3. 9 Bin - Bucket groups of employees evenly into 3 bins, then split those into 3 bins each to arrive at 9 bins of employees. Then assign ratings to the bins.
4. Multi-level - Managers set their ratings first, and then the group gets together to compare ratings and fill in the Final Ratings.
5. Stacked Draft - Another form of multi-level calibration (similar to #4), but is done using a draft stacking approach instead. Similar to how sports leagues draft incoming athletes, this process progressively selects employees from the available pool one-by-one.
6. Full Cross-rating - Have every calibrator rate every employee, then use the composite signal as ordering to determine a final rating.