Performance Reviews in Small Improvements are as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Before you launch your performance review cycle, consider:
How often do you want performance reviews done?
What questions do you want to ask?
Which departments and employees should participate?
Performance reviews are organized into cycles. Think of a cycle as one set of reviewees, one set of questions, and one set of dates and deadlines.
If you want to tailor your questionnaire for different departments, each department needs its own cycle. If you want to review different sites at different times, each location needs its own cycle.
Create your cycle
To create a new review cycle or modify an existing one, toggle to your Admin view and navigate to your Reviews dashboard. Then click Create Cycle in the upper right corner.
What type of cycle?
First you'll need to decide whether or not you'll be calibrating ratings. Click here for a complete walkthrough on Calibration cycles.
Standard reviews allow managers to select overall ratings for their teams without any further approval. Ratings are shared with employees immediately when shared by their managers.
Calibrated reviews allow managers to select a preliminary rating, but gives HR Admins the opportunity to make adjustments before ratings are shared with employees.
Who’s under review?
Next, select the employees who are under review in this cycle ("reviewees"). You can filter for reviewees by department, location, employment type, and more. For small cycles, you can also select participants manually.
If you’d like to set up a review cycle for the future or don’t know exactly who should be reviewed yet, just click “Choose later” to skip this step.
Name your cycle
Next, give the cycle a name and introduction message. Employees will see this introduction at the top of the page when writing their self-assessments, as will managers when writing reviews for their reports.
The time period under review tells employees the time period they are reflecting on. This setting does not impact the timeline for the review cycle itself - that comes later.
Writing and sharing process
Next, you have some choices to make regarding the writing and sharing process.
Indirect manager contribution: Indirect managers (also known as skip-level managers) will always be able to read the performance reviews of their reporting line, but enabling this option also allows them to contribute to reviews.
Indirect managers will contribute to the same form as the direct manager. If you'd like each reviewer to submit separate evaluations, consider using our 360 Feedback module instead.
Finished writing indicator: Enabling this option allows managers to mark reviews as Written before they have been shared with the employee. This is recommended when indirect managers are also able to contribute to reviews so that they know when reviews are ready for their input. It's also recommended in calibrated cycles so that HR Admins know when reviews are ready for their final approval.
Sharing Assessments: Hide reviewer assessments from reviewees until both have shared, if you don't want employees to see the manager assessment until they have submitted the self-assessment. Hide self-assessment from reviewer until both have shared, if you don't want managers to see the self-assessment until they have submitted the manager assessment. Select both options for a double-blind approach.
We generally recommend hiding the reviewer assessment from the reviewee, but allowing the reviewer to see the self-assessment as soon as it is ready. This gives managers the opportunity to anticipate areas of misalignment and tailor their feedback accordingly.
Create the questionnaire
Now you’ll design your questionnaire. You can start with a template from our library or create your own questionnaire entirely from scratch.
Questions marked as mandatory must be answered to complete the review.
Questions marked as confidential are visible only to the reviewee's management chain and HR Admins. Reviewees won't know that the question is being asked, nor will they see the manager's response when the rest of the results are shared. This is a great way to document feedback on promotion readiness, compensation, or other sensitive topics.
2D Graph
Consider enabling the 2D Assessment Graph, similar to a 9-box assessment, to get a visual snapshot of alignment between managers and their reports. Both will be asked to plot the reviewee's performance on a 2D graph. The axis labels default to “Results” versus “Behavior,” but these are fully customizable.
When analyzing your results, you'll have access to a graph showing every employee's placement on the 2D graph, which can be filtered manager-by-manager for a high-level signal of alignment. In the example below, we see that Stan considers himself a high achiever, while his manager has quite a different view. This could indicate that expectations were not set clearly and probably warrants a closer look.
Personalizing questions
Use replacements to personalize the questionnaire depending on who is viewing it. Click Insert to see a list of replacement options.
Overall Rating
Finally, you might choose to include an overall rating in your questionnaire. The rating can be marked as confidential to keep it hidden from reviewees.
Reviewers are empowered to select the overall rating manually; no automatic calculation is performed by the system.
The 2D graph and overall ratings help to power our Insights dashboard. If you rely heavily on this dashboard, we recommend incorporating the 2D graph and overall ratings into your reviews.
Set the cycle’s timeline
Please see here for an overview of the cycle timeline settings.
Self-assessments and manager assessments open on the Cycle Start date. You can enable an automatic launch email, or leave this option unchecked to send them manually later on. If you'd like the cycle to start immediately, simply set Cycle Starts to a date in the past.
The Deadline for Reviewees is the date by which employees are required to share their self-assessments. The Deadline for Reviewers is the date by which managers are required to share their manager assessments.
After these dates, assessments are no longer editable. Assessments saved as drafts are not automatically shared; employees need an extension from an HR Admin to finalize and share. (See here for instructions on granting extensions.)
If you choose to enable a Grace Period, the deadlines are no longer binding, and employees will be allowed to run late until the end of the grace period. Grace periods are not publicized; employees will only see the soft deadline in notifications and throughout our system.
Reviewees and reviewers are asked to sign the review once shared. Everyone Should Sign By is the date on which signing is no longer possible and the cycle locks down.
There are a few extra timeline settings for calibration cycles. Please see here for more details.
Automate reminders
Enabling "get started" nudges will send reviewees and reviewers weekly reminders about any assessments they have not yet started writing.
Enabling "start sharing" nudges will send reviewers weekly reminders about any assessments they have not yet shared with the reviewee.
Customize your emails
Customers on our Elevate plan can customize and disable notifications.
Edit the notifications at the account level instead if you want your changes to apply to all current and future cycles.
Finish and launch
You're ready to save your cycle! If your cycle is starting immediately, you’ll have the option to notify participants immediately, or you can skip this step and notify participants manually later on.
If you choose to send your notifications later, simply use the options in the Notify menu in the upper right corner of the cycle overview page when you're ready.
Congratulations on launching your cycle! Check out our article on Performance Review Analytics for guidance on tracking participation and analyzing results.