How to manage annual performance reviews with Trello
Manage annual performance and professional development reviews in Trello, and use the Email for Trello Power-Up to send email updates from your board in real time.
Annual performance reviews are an important opportunity to identify areas for employee growth, celebrate achievements, and set goals for the year ahead. But managing professional development reviews across your business can be a logistical headache, especially when you’re juggling forms, emails, and meeting notes.
Trello offers a simple, visual way to track your performance review process from start to finish. By managing everything on one board, your team can keep all information accessible, ensuring a transparent and efficient experience for everyone involved.
In this article, we show you how to:
Design an effective annual performance review workflow with Kanban in Trello.
Gather feedback with the Email for Trello Power-Up.
Collate information and discuss action items with your team.
Send email updates once each review is complete.
Your Trello workflow for running yearly performance reviews
1. Design your performance review process
Start by creating a Trello board dedicated to your performance reviews. Set up a Trello card to represent each employee, so that you can manage action items and discussion for each individual separately.
Make the most of Trello’s built-in collaborative features like:
Due dates to make sure reviews are completed on time.
Card members to assign managers, HR members, and employees.
Checklists to outline each step, like scheduling meetings, collecting peer feedback, or updating professional development plans. For more inspiration, check out our list of 8 cool things you can do with Trello checklists.
💡 TIP Looking to take your team’s collaboration to the next level? Find out more about how to use Trello for organizing your team’s to-dos.
The Trello interface is based on Kanban – a popular methodology for visualizing your tasks and optimizing your workflow.
A simple example of a Kanban workflow with three lists – To Do, In Progress, and Done
As work progresses, cards move from list to list through each stage of the process. This means that your team can easily see where each review stands, and take action to move things along if needed. For example, your lists may include: Waiting for Review > Manager Feedback > Employee Feedback > Meeting > Completed.
💡 TIP Find out more about how to use Kanban to organize your Trello email inbox and up your team’s productivity.
2. Gather team input via email
Once your workflow is set up, it’s time to get feedback from managers, peers, and employees.
To keep everything in one place, use SendBoard’s Email for Trello Power-Up to send and receive review-related emails directly from each Trello card.
You can standardize your outreach by creating a template emails for things like:
Informing team leaders that performance reviews are about to happen
Sending out feedback forms for peer review
Organizing meetings to conduct the formal review and set goals for the next cycle
Here’s an example Saved Reply email template requesting employee feedback:
Dear {%contactFirstname%},
We’re starting our annual performance review cycle, and we’d like your feedback on {%card.name%}.
Please complete the employee feedback form here: {%Form_Link%}
If you have any questions, please reach out to the head of {%Department_Name%} on {%HOD_Email%}.
Kind regards, {%userFirstname%}
Variables (the parts in curly brackets) can be used to pull information like employee name, manager, or review link directly from your Trello card, so that each email stays personal and accurate.
💡 TIP Take a look at our help center for a full list of supported SendBoard email variables, with additional instructions on how to reference Trello Custom Fields.
If you need to, you can engage multiple stakeholders of your choosing (managers, peers, employees, reviewers, HR) via email on a single Trello card. All incoming replies and related discussion appears on the same Trello card, meaning everyone can collaborate seamlessly, without losing track of who said what.
💡 TIP Got some sensitive information that you don’t want an employee to see? With Email for Trello’s multiple email thread feature, you can easily select which emails you want to include or exclude from your replies.
3. Collate the feedback received
When feedback starts coming in, use each Trello card to keep that information organized. For example:
Create Trello Custom Fields to save and display important additional data on your cards, like employee role, review score, or next development milestone. Discover our 4 top tricks for making the most of Trello Custom Fields.
Use Trello checklists to note action items (i.e. ‘update role description’ or ‘schedule quarterly check-in’), and list discussion points like what went well, growth areas identified, or goals for the following year.
Add Trello Power-Ups to integrate your team’s favorite tools. For example, use the Google Drive Power-Up for storing review forms, or add Slack for quick team comms. Find more handy integrations with our ultimate guide to Trello Power-Ups.
💡 TIP Did you know that you can receive and reply to form submissions directly in Trello with Blue Cat Forms and Email for Trello? No manual copy-pasting required! We also have guides for how to connect common contact forms to Trello, and even how to get Google Forms into Trello with the help of Zapier.
4. Send final updates via email
After the performance review period is complete, it’s good practice to send a summary email to each employee, outlining the key discussion points and any next steps. Email for Trello can help you automate this process, too!
For example, when a card is moved to the ‘Completed’ list, you can use Trello automation to trigger a Saved Reply template email thanking the employee and summarizing the outcomes of the performance review.
Here’s how it would work:
Create a new Saved Reply
Create the template email you want to send. In the following example, we use the card checklist variable to draw attention to what was discussed, and include a Custom Field variable with a link to the employee’s updated development plan.
Dear {%contactFirstname%},
Your annual performance review is now complete. Thank you for your participation and contribution throughout the process. We’d like to draw your attention to the key discussion points:
{%card.checkliststate%}
Please follow the link to view your updated goals and development plan for the coming year: {%Plan_Link%}
Kind regards, {%userFirstname%}
Set up a Trello automation rule
To automatically send your template email, set up a Trello automation rule. This consists of two parts:
Trigger: When card is moved into list ‘Completed’
Action: Post comment @reply ##reviewupdate
To understand the details of how this automation works, take a look at how to drag a Trello card to send an email.
💡 TIP If you want to send the same update email across all completed performance reviews in one click (i.e. without having to move each Trello card individually), you can create a Trello button automation to send batch emails to many contacts at once.
This process ensures consistency of communication, and gives employees clear documentation that they can refer back to throughout the year.
Simplify your annual performance reviews with Trello
Running professional development reviews doesn’t have to be an administrative burden. With Trello, you can visualize every stage of the process from feedback collection to final summaries – and manage it all in one place.
Plus, with the Email for Trello Power-Up you can communicate via email directly from your review board, gather feedback easily, and maintain transparency between team members.
Next year, you’ll be able to revisit the same Trello board to track progress, review outcomes, and set fresh goals, so that each review cycle is smoother than the last.
