Employee of the month nomination questions a panel can judge

Most nomination forms collect adjectives. This one collects evidence: thirteen fields, no rating scales, and a signature, because a nomination names a colleague and cannot be anonymous.

13fields
About 5 minto fill in
Signednever anonymous
0rating scales

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Employee of the Month Nomination Form · answer to move through it

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Question 1 of 13 Who this is about

Who are you nominating? Give their full name.

Question 2 of 13 Who this is about

Which team or department do they work in?

Question 3 of 13 Who this is about

Your full name.

Question 4 of 13 Criterion and timing

Which criterion is this nomination against?

Went past what the role asks for

Helped another team at a cost to their own work

Caught or fixed a problem before it became expensive

Held a standard when it would have been easier not to

Improved how the work is done, not only what got done

Kept the quality up over a long stretch

Question 5 of 13 Criterion and timing

When did the thing you are nominating for happen?

This month

Last month

Earlier this quarter

Longer ago than that

It has been going on for months

Question 6 of 13 The evidence

Describe one specific thing they did. Say what the situation was and roughly what date it was.

Question 7 of 13 The evidence

What happened as a result, and how do you know?

Question 8 of 13 The evidence

Who else saw this, or where is it written down?

Question 9 of 13 The evidence

What made this more than the job already asks of them?

Question 10 of 13 What the panel needs to be fair

What is your working relationship to the nominee?

I manage them

I am on their team

I am in a different team

They manage me

I am a client, customer or supplier

I am nominating myself

Question 11 of 13 What the panel needs to be fair

Did anyone ask you to write this nomination?

No, I decided to

A manager suggested it

My team agreed to put them forward

The nominee asked me to

Question 12 of 13 What the panel needs to be fair

As far as you know, has the nominee won this award before?

Yes, this year

Yes, in an earlier year

I do not know

Question 13 of 13 Anything else

Anything the panel should know that these questions did not ask for?

Thirteen employee of the month nomination questions, and what a panel does with them

Five blocks. One makes two nominations comparable, one collects the evidence a panel weighs, and one says whether the round itself was fair.

Plain text, one question per line, with the answer scale.

Who this is about, and who is asking

The third field is the design decision. The nominator signs before writing a word of evidence, because a nomination names a colleague and there is no version of it that is anonymous.

Who are you nominating? Give their full name.Short text, required Written for this templateAsk for the full name. Two people called Sam on one shift is how a nomination reaches the wrong desk.
Which team or department do they work in?Short text, required Written for this templateThe panel needs it to route the award, and to see when a whole round came out of one team.
Your full name.Short text, required Modelled on the signature requirement in the US federal awards guideThe signature, asked third rather than last, so it is visible while the nominator can still stop. Federal award nominations are signed by the agency head for the same reason.[3]

Which criterion, and when it happened

Two choices that make two nominations comparable. Without them a panel ranks a warehouse against a helpdesk on impressions.

Which criterion is this nomination against?Single choice, one criterion per nomination Adapted from the three-way basis in 5 CFR 451.104One nomination, one criterion, so a panel can read everything filed under one heading together. The six options are a working set. US federal awards use only three.[4]
When did the thing you are nominating for happen?Single choice Written for this templateA nomination for something that happened in the spring is not wrong. It is a different decision, and a panel should make it once rather than case by case.

The evidence a panel can weigh

The four fields the form exists for. Each asks for something a person who was not there could check.

Describe one specific thing they did. Say what the situation was and roughly what date it was.Open text, required Modelled on the critical incident techniqueOne incident with a rough date, not a summary of a person. The method is seventy years old. Its first principle: reporting facts about behaviour beats collecting interpretations, ratings and opinions based on general impressions.[1]
What happened as a result, and how do you know?Open text, required Modelled on the justification test in the US federal awards guideWhat followed, and the evidence for it. The federal test is to explain the impact and show how the person was personally responsible, in plain language.[3]
Who else saw this, or where is it written down?Short text, required Written for this templateCorroboration, in one line, and the cheapest fairness check here. Work only one person saw is not disqualified, but a panel should know that is what it weighs.
What made this more than the job already asks of them?Open text, required Written for this templateThe field that stops a nomination for doing the job. Federal guidance reserves these awards for exceptional contributions,[3] and the nominator knows better than the panel where that line sits.

What the panel needs in order to be fair

Three questions about the nomination rather than the nominee. They cost fifteen seconds and let a panel see its own pattern.

What is your working relationship to the nominee?Single choice Written for this templateWho is speaking. A manager writing about their own report and a colleague in another team are both worth reading, and are not the same document. Self-nomination sits on the list rather than being quietly banned.
Did anyone ask you to write this nomination?Single choice Written for this templateSolicitation, asked out loud. One suggested nomination is still a nomination. A round where most came from the same manager is a different thing, and this is the only field that shows it.
As far as you know, has the nominee won this award before?Single choice Written for this templateThe repeat check. Schemes drift toward the same few names. One public sector scheme hard-codes a rule instead, barring a previous winner for twenty-four months.[6]

Anything else

One optional box, last, so anyone who stops here has already given the panel what it needs.

Anything the panel should know that these questions did not ask for?Open text, optional Written for this templateWhere a nominator puts what did not fit the criterion they picked. Read these before the next round and they will tell you which criterion is missing.

What is deliberately missing. There is no rating scale here. Nothing asks the nominator to score a colleague out of five on teamwork, values or work quality. A nominator is a sample of one, and scores from a sample of one are a number a panel cannot use. Scoring happens later, applied to what was written.

If your scheme needs more, add the nomination period and a file upload, both at the end. Never a second nominee, a second criterion, or a box ranking this nominee against anybody else.

What makes a nomination judgeable, and what makes it useless

A panel can only compare nominations that contain something comparable. Advice to be specific is easy to find. A test you can apply before you submit is not.

Three questions, applied by the nominator before they submit. Does it name one thing that happened, on a day somebody could look up? Does it say what would otherwise have happened? Could someone who was not there check any part of it? A nomination failing all three is a compliment, which is a fine thing to give a colleague and not something a panel can rank.

This is an old finding, not a new opinion. The critical incident method was set out in 1954 on exactly this point: reporting facts about behaviour is preferable to collecting interpretations, ratings and opinions based on general impressions.[1] Its author had seen what happens without that rule. Reasons for eliminating pilot candidates came back as phrases like unsuitable temperament and poor judgment, which he called cliches and stereotypes.[1] Field 6 asks what he asked: describe the action.

Two blank forms side by side, one nearly empty with a single scribbled line and one filled with dated entries, a calendar mark and three bars of evidence, with a magnifier between them — Same form, same criterion, two nominations. Only one of them can be judged.

What arrives	The same nomination, made judgeable
She is always helpful and has a great attitude.	On 14 March two people called in sick an hour before the shift. She rebuilt the rota before the doors opened and we ran the day without agency cover.
He goes above and beyond every single day.	He noticed the returns queue was counted twice and rewrote the count sheet. The daily stock check now takes twenty minutes instead of an hour, and the warehouse lead can confirm it.

Both columns above are illustrative and written for this page. Worked nominations elsewhere use invented names and round-number results without saying so, which is worth knowing before you copy one.

The literacy problem this creates. Asking for written evidence rewards people who write easily, and a warehouse or a kitchen is full of people who do the work and do not. So the fields are short rather than one box wanting three hundred words. Answer what happened, what followed and who saw it in a line each, and the nomination is judgeable. On the panel side, score what is in it, not how it reads.

Setting the criteria your employee of the month nomination form asks against

Field 4 is a list of six. Yours will differ, and these are the properties that decide whether it works.

A criterion a panel can use	A criterion that will cause an argument
Names something the person did that somebody else could have seen	Names a quality they are said to have
Can be failed. Somebody could genuinely miss it this month	Is met by everyone in the building on an ordinary day
Was published before the round opened	Was worked out while the panel read

A criterion everybody already meets is worse than no criterion. An industrial laundry group ran a monthly perfect-attendance award at one of its five plants and measured it against the other four. Employees improved their timekeeping only while eligible, and called in sick to protect eligibility. Workers who already had perfect attendance before the award existed dropped 6 to 8 percent in productivity. Across the plant, productivity fell 1.4 percent.[5] The executive team cancelled it, saying it rewarded behaviour that should be expected of everyone.[5] That is one company and 62,995 worker-days, not a law. It is still the clearest published warning against an award for turning up.

Two published sets to borrow from. US federal awards run on three bases: a contribution that improves how the work is done, a special act in the public interest, or performance recognised without a rating of record.[4] The UK Geography in Government awards judge every category on communication, inclusion, impact and lasting legacy.[9] Both are public and both are short.

Publish the list before the round opens. A criterion invented while the panel reads is a criterion shaped by the nominations in front of it. To keep the form and the list together, open this template in a free form maker and change the six options to yours.

A nomination is signed, and the nominator should know it first

Nobody on this search says this out loud. It is not a flaw in the form. It is what a nomination is.

A nomination names a colleague, so it cannot be anonymous. Even a form with no name field is attributable by construction: an account of one incident is written from a point of view only the few people there could have had. Pretending otherwise sets the nominator up to write something they would not have written had they known who would see it.

What usually happens to a nomination. One public sector programme states that the selection committee will remain anonymous, that each nominator must submit their own form, and that human resources sends the nominee's supervisor a copy of the actual nomination.[6] That is the inverse of what people assume: the panel is anonymous and the nominator is not. Federal award nominations go further and require the signature of the agency head.[3]

So write it on the form and mean it. Say who reads the nomination, whether the nominee will see it, whether their manager will, and what happens to the ones that do not win. Four sentences at the top beats a promise of confidentiality nobody can keep.

When anonymity is what you actually need, this is the wrong form. A question people will only answer without their name on it needs a different instrument and a different setup, and that is on the anonymous employee questionnaire template. If the question is a rounded read on one named colleague rather than a case for an award, a 360 degree feedback form collects it from several people at once.

Judging a stack of nominations without a popularity contest

Four steps. The first two do most of the work; the last is the one schemes skip.

Read by criterion, not by nominee
Sort the pile by field 4 and read each group together. Ranking a nomination for fixing a process against one for covering a shift is a judgement about which criterion matters, and that belongs to whoever set them.
Score the evidence, on the same anchors, for everyone
Rate what the nomination contains, not how it reads. One published scheme awards up to 15 points across five areas: number of nominations, nominator comments, supervisor comments, work beyond standard responsibilities, and impact.[6] Structured hiring works the same way. The same questions for everyone, scored against set benchmarks, raises rater agreement and reliability.[7]
Ask who was never nominated
A round is not only the nominations you got. Visible work gets seen; night shifts, back offices and maintenance do not, so a list of winners can be a map of visibility rather than of contribution. Award records show how far that goes: across 2,700 awards from 17 professional societies over five decades, women received 41.5 percent, and were about three times as likely as men to win a teaching award and a third less likely to win a research or senior one.[8] Those are academic awards, not workplace schemes, and the study has no data on who nominated whom.[8]
Write the reason down and publish it
One paragraph naming the criterion the winner was judged against and the evidence behind it. It takes five minutes, and it is what makes next month's nominations better.

When nothing comes in. The common failure is not a bad nomination. It is an empty inbox and a manager quietly writing all of them, which is a manager's pick in a nomination costume. Field 11 shows you that. The fix is a shorter form and a named window, not a longer reminder.

This form cannot tell you whether the scheme is working. It is filled in by the people who chose to write one, the least representative group in the building. Whether the criteria are believed, and whether the award should keep running, are questions for everyone.

If the wider question is whether being noticed here works at all, that is the employee recognition program survey. If the criteria are your stated values, the core values survey asks whether anyone can name them. And the nearest relative of this form is not a survey: a reference is the other document where one person vouches for another, which is why the reference check questions template asks for incidents too.

Questions people ask about nomination forms

Are employee of the month nominations anonymous?

No, and a form that hints otherwise is misleading the person filling it in. A nomination names a specific colleague and is written by somebody who works with them, so the panel can see who wrote it, and often so can other people: one public sector programme sends a copy of the actual nomination form to the nominee's supervisor while keeping the selection committee itself anonymous.[6] That is the usual shape, and it is the opposite of what most people assume.

What do you write in an employee of the month nomination?

One thing that happened, roughly when, what followed, and who else saw it. That is fields 6 to 9, and it is the whole job. The failure mode is praise with no event in it: a nomination saying somebody is always helpful gives a panel nothing to weigh, because every nomination says that.

How long should a nomination be?

Shorter than the internet tells you. Most nomination advice asks for 150 to 300 words of prose, which quietly excludes anyone whose job does not involve writing. The US federal awards guide caps its own nominations at two pages and asks for a fifty to sixty word citation.[3] If your scheme gets nothing back, the length of the form is the first thing to look at.

What criteria should an employee of the month nomination form use?

Between four and seven, each naming a behaviour rather than a quality, and published before the round opens. The six in field 4 are a working set. For public models, the UK Geography in Government awards judge every category on communication, inclusion, impact and lasting legacy,[9] and the US federal basis is narrower still.[4]

How do you stop it becoming a popularity contest?

Three things, and none is a better trophy. Ask for evidence rather than a rating, so a nomination contains something checkable. Read the nominations grouped by criterion, not as one ranked list. And keep fields 11 and 12, which show whether a round was written freely and whether the same name keeps coming back.

Should a nomination form use rating scales?

Not for judging the nominee, no. A nominator rating a colleague on five qualities produces one impression wearing five hats. Told very emphatically to rate four qualities independently, one flight commander's ratings of 137 cadets still correlated .51, .58 and .64 across them, because a general feeling about the person coloured all of them.[2] Scales belong on the panel side, applied to what was written.

Methods and sources

Michael Hodge

Survey methodology and questionnaire design, SuperSurvey

Survey methodologist and editor since 2003: wording, response scales, reliability checks, reporting that maps to a decision.

No field is a rating scale, and none asks a nominator to score a colleague
No Gallup Q12 item is reproduced, reworded or matched in shape
Every figure traced to the report it appears in. The recognition statistics circulating on this subject trace back to vendor blog posts with no sample size or method, and none is used
Both comparison tables are illustrative and say so on the page

Updated 9 September 2026 · How templates are reviewed

What this template is based on

The evidence fields are modelled on the critical incident technique[1] and the justification test in the US federal awards guide.[3] Carrying no rating scale rests on the halo finding[2] and on what a nominator is: one person with one view. The criteria properties draw on 5 CFR 451,[4] UK award criteria[9] and a US public sector scheme.[6]

Question licensing

No licensed instrument is reproduced, and none exists here: nomination items are ad hoc form fields, not a standardised scale. The federal material is public domain.[3][4][7] The UK award criteria contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.[9] Everything here is yours to copy, edit and translate.

Limits and disclosure

The award programme result is one company, five plants and an attendance criterion,[5] so it warns about a criterion everybody already meets, not about award schemes in general. The award-record analysis covers academic awards and has no data on nominator behaviour.[8] The scoring model quoted is one programme's, published in 2014.[6] No figure on this page comes from SuperSurvey.

SuperSurvey makes the editor this template opens in. The thirteen fields are free to copy and edit with or without it.

References

Flanagan, J. C. "The Critical Incident Technique." Psychological Bulletin 51(4), 1954, 327-358. apa.org (PDF)
Thorndike, E. L. "A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings." Journal of Applied Psychology 4(1), 1920, 25-29. Ratings of 137 aviation cadets. mit.edu (PDF)
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Guide to Processing Awards Requiring OPM Approval, 2011. opm.gov (PDF). US government work, public domain.
Code of Federal Regulations, title 5, part 451, "Awards", 2023 edition, sections 451.102 to 451.104. govinfo.gov. US government work, public domain.
Gubler, T., Larkin, I. and Pierce, L. "The Dirty Laundry of Employee Award Programs: Evidence from the Field." Harvard Business School Working Paper 13-069, 2013. 276 workers, five plants, 62,995 worker-days, March 2010 to November 2011, difference in differences. hbs.edu (PDF)
Central Washington University. Employee of the Month: Guidelines for Nomination, revised 16 January 2014. cwu.edu
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Assessment and Selection: Structured Interviews. opm.gov. US government work, public domain.
Hopkins-Doyle, A., Chalmers, K. J., Toribio-Florez, D. and Cichocka, A. "Gender disparities in social and personality psychology awards from 1968 to 2021." Communications Psychology, 2024. 2,700 award records, 17 societies. nih.gov
Geography in Government Awards 2026: nomination guidance. gov.uk. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

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