A well-structured review cycle is a cornerstone of continuous improvement, enabling individuals and teams to assess progress, refine strategies, and achieve their goals with clarity and focus. Creating a systematic review process ensures that efforts are aligned, feedback is actionable, and progress is measurable.
Check the video guide
Check the video guide
Configure permissions
Configure permissions
First, you must have permission to access performance reviews and create review cycles at least.
Access review cycles
Access review cycles
To access review cycles, go to Performance > Review. Here, you can see a list of cycles with different statuses, manage them, and create new ones.
Create a review cycle
Create a review cycle
To add a new cycle, click + New review cycle, enter its name, and click Next.
A review cycle consists of 5 stages (tabs) described below.
Details tab
Besides the name of the cycle, at this stage, you must specify the employees (participants) who will be evaluated.
Using conditions, you can filter employees by various parameters to ensure maximum flexibility in selecting the subjects of evaluation. You can mention concrete employees or use departments, positions, divisions, locations, employment types, and other parameters to determine who to include or exclude from the list for evaluation.
For example, you want to conduct a review for a specific department but excluding senior employees.
When adding multiple conditions, you can choose the 'Operator and' option to narrow the selection, as all your conditions must work together. Otherwise, select the 'Or' option to select employees to whom either one condition or the other applies.
💡 The system automatically counts the employees to whom selected conditions are applicable.
Reviewers & templates tab
At this stage, you must select parties to give feedback and answer questions about previously chosen employees. For each review party, you must apply a proper question template.
To add a party to review, click + Add reviewer and select the appropriate variant.
You can add up to 6 review parties from the list of available:
'Self' option is designed for situations when employees need to provide self-assessment.
'Manager' option is for managers' evaluation of their subordinates. You can configure review visibility for managers. The 'Managers can see reviews about their subordinates as they are submitted' option allows receiving results in real time. If the 'Managers can see submitted reviews after the results have been shared' option is selected, then the manager will receive results only at the end of the review cycle.
'Upward' option is for reviews when subordinates evaluate the performance of their manager.
'Team lead' option is useful when it is necessary to review team members by their leader.
The 'Custom' option is intended for cases when employees have a custom field, such as a mentor. You select the Employee reference field, and the participant will be evaluated by the employee from the corresponding field of the participant's profile.
🪄 For more about custom fields, see How to create custom fields.
'Peer' option is for colleague assessment. When creating the review cycle, you must set the minimum and maximum number of colleagues for one employee evaluation.
In addition, you need to select how peers must be nominated:
Employee themselves nominate colleagues who will review them. You can enable obligatory confirmation of nominated peers by the employee's manager or review creator (considered as HR)
Only the employee's manager or review creator (considered as HR) assigns peers
Only the review creator (considered as HR) appoints peers
🪄 See Nomination and approval of colleagues for peer review for more details.
Depending on the purpose, the review can include one, several, or all parties. For example, when conducting a 360 review, you need to include self-assessment and feedback from managers, peers, and upwards.
At this stage, you can enable sharing review results with employees when the cycle is completed. If you want peer and upward feedback to stay anonymous, you can enable the Share results anonymously option. So, the employee will only see the results without knowing the names of other reviewers. Otherwise, reviewers' names and shared results will be displayed.
Templates
For each review party, you must apply a proper question template.
🪄 For more info regarding question templates, see Dealing with question templates.
The self & manager question template works for self and manager reviewers.
The private manager assessment template applies to manager reviewers only.
The general question template can be used for upwards, team leads, peers, and custom reviewers.
Scoring tab
This tab is applicable only when managers review the competencies of their subordinates. For all details about this section, check the Performance score and competency weights.
Milestones tab
In this section, you must set the following parameters:
date of review cycle start
date by when peers must be nominated
final date for receiving responses (at this stage, managers should summarize the responses and share them with employees for discussion)
date when the review cycle is finished and all results are discussed
the period over which employee performance is evaluated
Kick-off tab
Here, you can edit the subject and the content of the email about the review. All participants (except for peers, as we nominate them later) receive this email and notifications on the platform on the date your cycle starts.
You can set reminders before the deadline for peer nomination and review submission.
As mentioned earlier, you must have the appropriate permission to create and manage reviews. In case you have them, you can access all review cycles within the company. If you want some to be able to access only one cycle, you can add them as Collaborators.
The review cycle is ready! 🎉 Don't forget to save and publish the cycle to start the evaluation. The automatically calculated number of participants in the cycle helps you understand how many employees must be evaluated. If participants do not have a manager and are included as reviewers, the system proceeds to the next party without a manager review.
