Guides to reviews that actually get done

A good field service performance review template stays short and role-specific. It covers six things: who the person is and what they do, a 1-5 skills assessment rated by both the manager and the employee, their strengths, the gaps to work on, goals for the next period, and the follow-up. The template below is ready to copy and use. FieldCon takes the same structure and runs it as a voice-first, phone-based workflow so nobody has to sit at a desk to fill it out.

Most teams land in one of three places: annual, quarterly, or continuous. A common, workable answer is a fuller review twice a year or quarterly, with lighter check-ins or pulse surveys in between. For field and trades teams, the better question is not how often but when. Timing should follow the work (seasonal ramps, project milestones, new crew), not a fixed calendar. Frequent but light beats rare and heavy, because the goal is to catch problems early while they are still cheap to fix.

To run a performance review for a field employee, set clear expectations for their specific role, have them self-assess on their phone, compare their ratings to yours to find the gaps, then have a short conversation focused on those gaps and one goal to work on. Skip the long typed forms and the calendar-locked cycles. The point is a real conversation, not a completed document, so build the process around how crews actually work.

Good performance review questions for construction and the trades are specific, tied to the actual work, and built around behavior you can point to, not generic ratings. Ask where someone put safety first and where they cut a corner, where their craftsmanship held up under pressure, and whether the crew could count on them. Below are ready-to-use questions grouped by safety, quality of work, reliability, communication, leadership, and growth, with a note on keeping them role-specific so an apprentice is not measured like a foreman.