Annual Review Survey

"How likely are you to recommend working in this department?" That is the last thing this survey asks, and it sits there for a reason. After someone has scored the year and written out what went well and what didn't, that single NPS number tells you whether the review period left them more committed or less. The Annual Review Survey is structured to earn an honest answer to it: 12 fields spread across a cover page, four content pages, and an ending screen, with a completion time of 10 to 15 minutes.

Four ratings, three written reflections, and one closing number

The survey opens with the essentials: a required name and email, a Department dropdown with six options (Engineering, Marketing, Sales, HR, Finance, and Operations), and a Review Period selector covering Q1 through Q4 plus a Full Year choice. That last dropdown quietly does a lot of work, because it lets one form serve quarterly check-ins and the year-end round without maintaining duplicates.

The core of the review is four required ratings on 5-point scales: Overall Performance, Communication Skills, Technical Skills, and Leadership. Numbers alone flatten a year of work, so three optional long-form prompts follow: Key Achievements, Areas for Improvement, and Goals for Next Period. Keeping those optional is deliberate. People with something to say will say it, and the rest won't pad your data with filler. The NPS question then closes the loop by compressing the whole experience into one comparable score.

Where the ratings and the comments start to disagree

Because Department and Review Period are structured dropdowns rather than free text, comparisons stay clean: Engineering's average Leadership score against Marketing's, or Q2 against the full year. Per-question breakdowns in the response analytics surface patterns a summary average hides, like a team that rates itself high on Technical Skills but low on Communication. That gap is usually where next period's goals belong.

When you need the data elsewhere, export the full response set to CSV, or push each submission into your HR stack as it arrives using webhooks or the Zapier connection.

Who actually runs their review cycle through this form

HR teams use it to standardize the year-end cycle, since the shared Department dropdown keeps every submission comparable across the company. Managers of small teams send it before one-on-ones as a lightweight self-review, so the conversation starts from the respondent's own account of achievements and goals rather than a blank page. And because the template was written with relationship and satisfaction tracking in mind, service firms adapt it for year-end client reviews, swapping the skills ratings for satisfaction measures and reading the NPS question as renewal intent.

Reshape the departments, the scales, and the tone before sending

Every label, option, and rating scale here is yours to change: trade the six default departments for your actual org chart, add rating rows for competencies you care about, or rewrite the reflection prompts in your company's voice. Your branding, colors, and logo carry through the whole survey.

The template recommends conversational mode, which presents one question at a time and suits a reflective topic like an annual review far better than a wall of inputs. You can also toggle the progress bar and back navigation to match how much freedom respondents get while answering. When it's ready, share it by link, QR code, or social post, embed it on an intranet page, or place it in WordPress with the Uplup plugin's shortcode. Publishing does require a Business plan account, and after that, any edits you make go live immediately.