How to drive growth with performance reviews

Managing performance in a global, hybrid workforce can be difficult. Between multiple time zones, diverse work cultures, and remote collaboration, traditional performance reviews often fail to deliver real impact.

At Revolut, we felt this challenge firsthand. With over 10,000 employees in 60+ countries, we needed a structured and data-driven performance management system. This need drove the creation of our performance review scorecard framework — a system designed to remove bias, standardise evaluations, and provide development paths for every employee.

After conducting 130,000+ performance reviews, we developed a smart, scalable performance management process that drives real business growth. Download it today, and your company can start building a more effective review process, too.

Get your free performance review template now.

Why traditional performance reviews fall short

Many companies struggle with performance management because:

• evaluations are inconsistent — each manager applies their own criteria, making reviews unfair
• feedback lacks direction — employees don’t understand how to improve
• they're reactive, not proactive — reviews focus on past work, instead of setting future goals

Creating a higher standard of work in a fast-moving, global workforce requires a organised approach to eliminate subjectivity, align teams, and fuel long-term growth.

The 3 pillars of effective performance reviews

We find the best way to standardise reviews is to assess employees on 3 key factors:

• Deliverables — the ability to complete tasks, graded on speed, quality of output, and the complexity of tasks
• Skills — the technical competencies required for the role
• Culture — alignment with company values and behaviours

Measuring these areas means all performance reviews are consistent, actionable, and growth-focused.

Deliverables — measuring execution with clarity

It's important to evaluate employees on how they deliver work, not just the quality of what they're delivering. Our assessments ask 3 questions:

• Speed — can the employee consistently meet deadlines?
• Quality — how many iterations are required to complete a task?
• Complexity — does the work push boundaries, or is it routine?

Then, we assign each of these criteria a numerical score, and apply the formula (Speed + Quality) * Complexity. This allows us to get a straightforward, objective result from the evaluation, and provides an efficient way of reviewing performance across a global team.

Skills — a roadmap for growth

In fast-growing companies, clear career paths help show employees what’s required of them at each level of seniority. So, we list precise, role-specific technical competencies, setting easy-to-understand expectations for both employees and hiring teams. For example, a data scientist would be assessed on their:

• theoretical knowledge (including statistics and machine learning)
• coding proficiency (such as Python, SQL, or R)
• ability to design and implement models

These benchmarks show employees exactly what’s expected at their seniority level, and what they need to develop to progress.

Culture — making company values actionable

Scaling company culture across 60+ countries means making sure values aren't just words — they should be observable behaviours that are part of an employee's daily life. So instead of vague labels like 'team player', we assess culture with questions like:

• Does this employee proactively share knowledge?
• Do they adapt well to change?
• Do they support colleagues in meeting deadlines?

This approach makes culture a practical part of performance management, encouraging employees to engage with the values driving business success.

How our performance review scorecard framework ensures consistency

One of the biggest challenges in performance reviews is subjectivity. Our framework eliminates this by:

• standardising evaluations across all teams and locations
• using simple, true-or-false behavioural statements to remove bias
• applying a 5-level rating system (from Poor to Exceptional) for consistency

We try to make every review objective, organised, and repeatable, no matter where an employee is based.

Turning performance reviews into a growth tool

With the right structure, performance reviews can become more than just evaluations. They can evolve into a driving force for employee engagement and retention, as well as overall business growth.

With a scalable, standardised framework, reviews become:

• clear and actionable — employees know exactly how to improve
• consistent — all teams use the same benchmarks for evaluations
• future-focused — reviews set employees up for long-term career success

Get started with Revolut People

Revolut People offers a performance management platform to help you identify, hire, and retain high performers at scale. Our review framework and methodology already helps companies worldwide ‌evaluate employees fairly and encourage excellence.

Get your free Performance Review template now.

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