48 hours later: Remote just tested two-day performance reviews, now it’s your turn

 Two days. That’s how long it took us to run a global performance review for 1,800 employees. Not two months. Not six painful weeks of forms, spreadsheets, and email ping-pong. Just 48 hours, start to finish, feedback to calibration to decisions.

If that sounds unlikely, I get it. I’d already warned my team that it might not go well at first. I was okay with that. Worst case, it would help us learn faster. But the results surprised even me: a 95% completion rate, same-day decisions, and a team that didn’t burn out getting there. What started as an experiment became a prototype for something better, and now we’re making the blueprint public.

We created a one-page visual guide that breaks down the full 48-hour cycle, with stats, tools, and templates.

Recap: Our 48-hour performance review cycle

To share how we made it all happen, I joined our GM of HR Management, Ramya Venkateswaran, in a live webinar to walk through the process. As Remote’s Chief People Officer, I’ve spent the last 18 months focused on building the kind of culture and infrastructure that makes this kind of speed possible.

We talked about what had to change — from culture and tooling to expectations and habits — and how we built the foundation for a performance review cycle that now runs in just two days.

We covered everything from monthly check-ins and AI-generated reflections, to executive alignment and real-time calibration. Nobody likes doing performance reviews, and they are often unnecessarily time consuming, but we didn't want to rush either. We wanted to create more clarity, transparency, and a shared rhythm for feedback.

What we ended up with is something that was easier and simpler than the traditional review format we were using before.

My long-term vision is to get to a place where we don’t need formal performance reviews — because people are already having honest conversations about what’s going well, what needs work, and how their manager sees their growth trajectory. But until then...

Watch the full conversation below:

Why bother? Because performance reviews shouldn't be a job on top of your actual job

Performance reviews haven’t aged well. They’re bloated, time-wasting, and too often, they reward good memory over good work.

Here’s what we were seeing:

• Misalignment was everywhere. In the previous cycle, 436 employees had "self-rated" performance ratings that didn’t match their managers’ assessments.
  
  
• Feedback had a half-life. People were trying to remember what they achieved six months ago, and waiting just as long to hear how they’d done.
  
  
• Calibration was chaos. Spreadsheet silos. Complicated tools across more than one platform. Zero clarity.`

So we thought, what if we stopped trying to manage within a setup that is endlessly frustrating, and just replaced it?

The 48-hour sprint (in the making)

Getting to a two-day performance cycle meant months of groundwork. We jumpstarted the process of changing how we communicate, review, and decide 18 months ago.

Here’s what we wanted to focus on:

• Monthly performance check-ins via Slack prompts and Remote Perform, feeding a live calibration curve. No more starting from scratch every six months.
  
  
• A culture of no surprises, using trending performance check-in conversations to tackle ongoing underperformance, or celebrate achievements in real-time 

• Manager and IC training in every format — async, live, bite-sized, neurodivergent-inclusive.
  
  
• AI-powered review support that drafted self-assessments and manager reviews from real feedback and notes. 
  
  
• Pre-calibration alignment to define what “great” looks like in each role, before any individual names are involved.
  
  
• Executive sponsorship and communication at every level — from Looms to live Q&As to Slack nudges.

We’d spent over a year reinforcing feedback habits, calibration routines, and performance norms. July was our opportunity to test them all together.

Day one: Write, tweak, submit

The first 24 hours were all about review submissions. Employees and managers could use AI to help generate draft assessments — pulling from past feedback, one-on-one notes, and performance highlights they’d logged in the platform.

• 95% of employees completed their reviews in one day
  
• 91% said the AI was helpful, with 35% rating it extremely helpful
• 44% saved 1–8 hours, and 3% saved as much as 40 hours
  
  

Day two: Calibrate and decide

With reviews submitted, day two focused on decisions:

• Live calibration dashboards helped teams surface outliers and align on expectations
• Auto-generated review packs streamlined every conversation
  
• Merit and promotion decisions were finalized the same day

There were no spreadsheets. No long email threads. Just clear inputs, aligned decisions, and momentum.

Can anyone do this?

Yes, but not overnight. We spent 18 months building the right habits before we ever hit “go.”

But now we've established a new baseline, it's easier for any company to replicate. With monthly performance check-ins now baked in, and AI helping us reduce admin time across the board — we're driving ongoing feedback into everyday interactions.

This isn't a case of speeding up just to move fast, but removing noise and focusing on the real stuff, instead.

Speak to us

If you’re curious about Remote Perform, we’re happy to walk you through it. Book a personalized demo. Two-day performance reviews can be your new standard, too.