Performance Management Guides: The WorkStory Knowledge Hub
Everything your team needs to design, run, and improve performance reviews—from foundational concepts to role-specific examples.

These guides are built for HR leaders, managers, and founders who want to understand how performance management actually works, not just how it’s supposed to work. Each guide covers the research, the failure modes, and the structural approaches that produce better outcomes.
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The Complete Guides

Performance Reviews: The Complete Guide
The definitive guide to performance reviews—what they're for, why they fail, and how to build a review process that actually works. Includes examples and FAQ.
Continuous Feedback: The Complete Guide
The complete guide to continuous feedback—what it is, why event-based feedback fails, and how to build a system that captures feedback where work actually happens.
Performance Review Feedback: How to Collect Inputs That Actually Work
What makes performance review feedback useful vs. useless. A guide to collecting structured, timely inputs that produce fair, specific reviews—not memory exercises.
Performance Review Examples: What Strong Reviews Actually Sound Like
Specific performance review examples for every situation—manager reviews, peer feedback, self-assessments, and goal summaries. Includes weak vs. strong comparisons.
Bias and Fairness in Performance Reviews: Why Reviews Feel Unfair and How to Fix It
Why performance reviews feel unfair—and the structural causes behind it. Covers recency bias, likeability bias, halo effects, and system-level solutions that actually work.
Performance Reviews by Role and Level: How Context Changes Everything
How to adapt performance reviews by role and level—ICs vs. managers, junior vs. senior, startup vs. enterprise. Includes role-specific examples.
How These Guides Connect
Each guide is designed to stand alone, but they reinforce each other. Here’s how they fit together:

The Performance Reviews guide is the foundation. It explains the core problem — that traditional review processes fail for structural reasons, not because managers aren’t trying — and frames the approach that works.

Continuous Feedback is the upstream input. The reason most reviews are inaccurate is that managers don’t have good data when they sit down to write them. A continuous feedback system fixes this.

Performance Review Feedback is the mechanics of collection. Once you’ve decided to gather broader input, this guide covers how to make that input useful instead of noisy.

Performance Review Examples and Bias and Fairness address the writing and calibration layer — what good reviews sound like, and what distorts evaluation quality even when the process is sound.

Performance Reviews by Role applies all of the above to specific contexts — because a review for an SDR looks different from a review for a senior engineer, even if the underlying principles are the same.

About WorkStory

WorkStory is performance management software built for how teams actually work. It integrates with your tools—Slack, Microsoft Teams, email—to collect continuous feedback throughout the year. Then, when review time arrives, managers have a full record of each person’s contribtions instead of trying to reconstruct months of work from memory and they can rely on integrated AI tools to make the writing easy.