[Performance Reviews] Instructions for Employees

Typically you will receive an email from your HR team to let you know when a review cycle has started. This may be in an email or in your Slack account. Click the link in the notification and you’ll be taken right to your review.

The homepage also provides a quick overview of your upcoming tasks, and a menu to take you to your reviews.

The Performance Review consists of a self-assessment and a manager assessment. Depending on how your admin team has chosen to configure the cycle, you may see a side-by-side view when writing reviews, with the self-assessment on the left side of the page and the manager assessment on the right.

At the top of the form, you'll see a header with important instructions and deadlines.

Initially, everything you write is private. You can write your review all in one go, or in chunks over time. Nobody but you can see how you go about it, not even HR, until you decide to share your self-assessment with your manager.

At the top of the screen, you will find information about the timeline of the review process. This is defined by your HR Admins. There may be some additional information from HR as well. We suggest you don’t do your Performance Review all in one day — it’s a good idea to let the review sit for a while after you write it, and revisit it after a few days have passed. Be sure you don’t wait till the day before it’s due to start!

If enabled by your company, the first part of the Performance Review is a 2D graph that lets you self-select your performance in a visual manner. Simply place the dot using your mouse.

The default scales for the axes are “Results” and “Behavior”. The higher you place the dot, the better you think you’ve achieved your goals and executed according to your job description. Behavior typically represents “soft skills,” so if you’ve been great about helping coworkers out, mentoring junior staff, and living the company values, you should place the dot in the far right.

Hint: Every company can define their own axis descriptions. Or your company may choose to disable the 2D chart altogether.

This is the most important part of the Performance Review. HR Admins can define what questions to ask and how many questions there are in total. Your review questionnaire may consist of qualitative, free-text style questions and/or quantitative, sliding-scale questions.

As you write, you can use our Rich Text Editor (RTE) to highlight your text and add bullet points, hyperlinks, and general text formatting.

Consider your responses carefully. There’s no need to write a novel, but an offhand response with three one-line bullet points is certainly not an adequate representation of your work achievements either. If you haven’t received specific instructions from HR, we’d suggest thinking about the self-assessment for half an hour first, and then spending around an hour or two writing and fine-tuning.

We recommend spreading out the process over two days, so you can double-check your self-assessment before you share it with your manager.

The last bit of the self-assessment is an overall performance rating. As with the 2D chart, this feature can be enabled or disabled by your company’s HR team. This is where you can rate your overall performance on a standard scale, e.g. from “superb” to “needs improvement.” With each rating, you’ll also see a short explanation.

If enabled by your admin team, you may be able to upload attachments to your self-assessment.

You can expand the Helpful Resources sidebar on the right side of the page to help refresh your memory of past accomplishments. You'll have easy reference to your activity across all of our other modules without leaving the page.

While your self-assessment is private to you at first, you’ll need to share it with your manager once it is complete. Click "Save and Close" to save your review as a draft and return to it later, and click "Share" when the review has been finalized.

Once you push the share button, your manager will receive an email notification. You can keep editing the review after it's been shared, but every edit you make after sharing will trigger an email notification to your manager. That way, if your manager has already read an earlier draft, they’ll know to go back into the system and read the latest version.

Once you’ve shared the review, you will see an “Un-share” button at the bottom of the page. So if you change your mind after sharing, you can hide the review again, work on it further, and then share it again when you’re sure you are ready.

Once your manager's assessment becomes available to you, you will get an email notification. You’ll see the self-assessment on the left side of the report, and the manager assessment on the right.

Once both the manager and employee have shared, both parties can sign. It’s not possible to sign before both sides have shared.

Access your review from the Your Reviews tab and click View to open:

The option to sign is shown at the bottom right of the review screen:

You can add a note to the review before signing. This will be visible to your manager and the HR team.

Signing puts the review into a protected read-only mode, which means you’re done. Only an HR admin can then revoke a signature and make the review editable again.