Even if your team has established strong habits of continuous and real-time feedback, performance reviews are an important opportunity to reflect on past accomplishments, level-set expectations, and plan for the future.
Your HR team will configure the specific dates and deadlines, but all performance reviews in Small Improvements consist of three basic stages:
Employees complete a self-assessment and share it with their manager.
Managers complete a manager-assessment and share it with the employee.
Managers and employees sign the review.
Getting started
You'll receive an email notification when your performance review kicks off. Click the link in the notification to start writing your self-assessment.
You'll also find a list of your outstanding tasks listed on your Small Improvements homepage.
At the top of the form, you'll see a header with important instructions and deadlines set by your HR Admins. Your HR Admins are also responsible for designing the questionnaire. Please contact them with any process-related questions.
Writing the self-assessment
The self-assessment is your opportunity to highlight accomplishments your manager may not be aware of, provide context for challenges you've faced or mistakes you've made, and chart a path to the next steps in your career development.
In most cases, self-assessments are made available to managers as soon as they are submitted, giving them the opportunity to take your self-assessment into account before finalizing your manager-assessment. Use this opportunity to make a case for the rating you deserve.
As you write, use our rich text editor to add formatting like bolding, hyperlinks, and bullet points.
Expand the Helpful Resources menu on the right side of the page to refresh your memory about your activity across our platform.
If enabled by your HR Admins, you may be able to upload attachments at the bottom of the form.
Saving and sharing
You can save your self-assessment as a draft and return to it later by clicking Save Draft in the bottom right.
Managers cannot see your self-assessment while it is saved as a draft.
Click Submit when you are ready to share your self-assessment with your manager.
If you do not share your self-assessment before the deadline, your draft is not shared automatically, but your HR Admins have the ability to share it on your behalf or grant you an extension.
If you lose your progress unexpectedly, e.g. you accidentally close the browser window, check your Backups to try to recover your work.
If you need to revise your self-assessment after it's been shared, go to your Reviews menu in the left navigation menu and click Edit next to the current review. Then click Unshare at the bottom of the form.
This will hide the self-assessment from your manager until you have re-shared, but it's possible that your manager may have already viewed the earlier version. We recommend communicating with your manager if you unshare and re-share the self-assessment to make sure they review the latest version before finalizing your manager-assessment.
Signing the review
You'll receive an email notification once the manager-assessment becomes available to you. At this stage, both you and your manager will be prompted to sign the review and optionally add a final comment.
Signing puts the review into a protected read-only mode. Only an HR Admin can revoke a signature and reopen the review for editing.
Accessing Past Reviews
Your Reviews dashboard will show all of the past and current reviews you've participated in as either a reviewee or reviewer. Use the filters on the right side of the page to help you navigate the list.
