As teams start to wrap up the calendar year they’re more than likely spending their days heads down in reports, reviews, and planning. Since it’s too late to launch any new campaigns, what’s left of the year is often reserved for administrative, hands-to-keyboard work. But that’s not to say it isn’t busy.
Leadership and executives have to complete year end reviews for both employees and the business, which is no small feat. From pulling reports to outlining the wins and misses of the year, there’s a lot to package up in a presentation. A year end review presentation can quickly turn into a Frankendeck— a hodgepodge of information and outdated slides without the right structure and design. To ensure your audience is able to digest what you’re sharing, your presentation should be on-brand, professional, and clear and concise. But beyond those simple rules of good presentation design, there are a few factors to keep in mind when creating your deck.
Use these 5 tips to nail your next year end review.
Start with a template
The end of the year can be hectic between final sales pushes and end of the year reports. The last thing you want to do is waste time fidgeting with charts and aligning text boxes. Instead of starting a presentation from scratch— or worse, using last year’s outdated year end review— use a presentation template to save time.
With a pre-built presentation template, you can keep things short and sweet without losing impact. Beautiful.ai’s Smart Slide templates use the principles of good design to make sure your presentation is always clean, professional, and on-brand.
Our Year End Employee Review template is perfect for managers and employees who need to align on expectations, can act as a take-away resource that employees can reference throughout the quarter, and helps management organize their notes and expectations for future hires. It is fully customizable so that leadership can easily tailor each review for individual employees.
For a more comprehensive business review, our End of Year Review template is a great option. Teams can customize the End of Year presentation template to summarize how the company performed over the past year, set goals for the future, and outline a strategy to meet future deliverables.
Communicate the objectives of the year
What were the objectives for the year as a team, or individually? You’ll need to look at the goals that were set, versus what was achieved, to measure the success. Communicate the objectives and results in a clear and concise way so that the audience knows exactly what was expected and delivered. This can help teams evaluate efficiencies and processes to determine the best strategies moving forward for optimal results.
Share your wins
Regardless of whether you’re conducting an employee review, or preparing a year end business review for upper-management, you’ll want to include wins of the year. Don’t be afraid to (humbly) brag. A performance review is the perfect time to share positive feedback and praise with your employee. What did they achieve in their roles, and how did it exceed expectations? Similarly, you can share the wins of your team and how their efforts impacted the overarching business goals. Executives will want to hear how different employees and departments hit their goals— and more importantly, how it contributed to the business.
Acknowledge missed opportunities
You can’t grow without acknowledging your weaknesses. What were the missed opportunities of the quarter and why? In any year-end review, it’s important to do a retrospective and analyze where there was room for improvement. Not only does this provide teams with constructive criticism, it can help teams set goals and prioritize projects moving forward. Use these slides as an opportunity to call out any missed opportunities— or low-hanging fruit— and define a plan to tackle those goals in the coming quarters.
Set goals for the new year
The purpose of a year end review is to take a look at the previous year in order to plan for the coming year. At the end of your presentation, include goals for what you’d like to achieve next. Whether that be certain campaigns or projects as a team, or improving output as an individual. Adding a slide with goals for the coming year can act as a resource for stakeholders to review throughout the quarter to hold themselves accountable.
