How Five Guys Completed 2,000+ Performance Reviews in 6 Weeks with 2-Way Self Evaluations

Performance reviews are supposed to align employees and managers. In frontline businesses, they often do the opposite.

When review cycles drag on for months, participation drops, managers lose visibility, and employees experience the process as something administrative rather than developmental. What should feel like structured feedback turns into another burden that leadership has to chase manually.

For one large Five Guys franchisee, that gap had become impossible to ignore.

Before Conversey, the review process had four core problems:

• reviews stretched across five months or more
• only 64% of employees participated
• managers struggled to track completion across 14 states and 100+ locations
• employees felt reviews were one-sided, with little room for their own perspective

The outcome was predictable: too much leadership time spent on coordination, inconsistent employee experiences, and far less cultural value than a review cycle should create.

The shift to a two-way review process

Conversey introduced a 2-Way Self Evaluation Review Process across more than 2,000 frontline employees.

The process changed the structure of the conversation before the manager meeting even began. Employees were not just recipients of feedback. They became participants in it.

With the new workflow, employees could:

• complete a self-evaluation before meeting with their manager
• compare their own input side by side with manager feedback
• participate in a true 360° review cycle where their voice was visible and valued

At the same time, the platform handled the operational work in the background:

• reminders were automated
• review progress was centralized
• accountability improved across locations
• bottlenecks that normally slowed the cycle were removed

Why participation changed so dramatically

The biggest improvement was not just speed. It was legitimacy.

When employees are asked to contribute their own perspective first, reviews stop feeling like a top-down formality. The process feels more balanced, and the conversation becomes easier to trust.

That changed the emotional tone of the review cycle.

Instead of employees feeling reviewed from a distance, they felt involved. And once that happened, participation was no longer something managers had to chase as aggressively.

The measurable impact

The results were dramatic:

• 2,000+ reviews completed in just 6 weeks
• the same process previously took 5+ months
• participation rose to 99.6%, up from 64%
• managers reported a more consistent and manageable process across 14 states
• the broader team experienced higher trust, stronger morale, and better engagement through a more transparent feedback cycle

That combination matters because speed alone is not enough. A fast process that people resent still creates drag. What made this work was the combination of:

• speed
• scale
• participation
• employee input

Together, those turned the review process from something teams tolerated into something that actually improved alignment.

The operational lesson

In multi-location frontline businesses, performance reviews break when they are treated as a compliance event instead of a communication system.

Conversey changed that by making reviews:

• faster to complete
• easier to track
• more consistent across locations
• more collaborative for employees

The result was a cultural shift. Performance reviews stopped being a one-way managerial obligation and became a structured engagement tool that employees could actually believe in.

That is why the six-week timeline matters. It is not just a productivity story. It is proof that when a review process respects the realities of frontline work, feedback becomes something that strengthens teams instead of draining them.