Conducting a review¶

This page follows one review from the moment it is created to the moment it is closed, from both sides: the reviewer’s and the employee’s.

Reviewers reach their reviews at Performance ‣ Reviews ‣ My Team; employees reach their own at Performance ‣ Reviews ‣ My Reviews; HR sees everything at Performance ‣ Reviews ‣ All Reviews.

The lifecycle¶

Status	Who acts	What has to happen to move on
Draft	The reviewer or HR	The review is created but not yet live. Nobody has been asked for anything.
Self-Assessment	The employee	Answer every required question addressed to the employee and submit.
Manager Assessment	The reviewer	Answer every required question addressed to the manager, set the proposed rating, and submit.
Shared	The employee	The review has been released. The employee reads it and signs it off, either acknowledging it or recording a written disagreement.
Done	—	Closed and locked. The retention date is stamped.
Cancelled	HR	The review will not happen. Its to-dos are closed and its meeting removed.

Each step is a button on the review, not a field you edit. A review’s status cannot be changed by typing over it, dragging a Kanban card or importing a file — only by the buttons, which check that the person pressing them is entitled to and that the work of the step is actually done.

What is on a review¶

Page	What is on it	Who sees it
Previous Plan	What was agreed last time and what came of it. Shown first, when a previous review exists.	Everyone
Questionnaire	The answers of this review, filtered to what the reader may see.	Everyone
Objectives	The objectives that were in scope for the period.	Everyone
Evidence	What was actually recorded about the employee during the period.	Everyone
Development Plan	What was agreed for next time, including carried-over actions.	Everyone
Participants	Who owes an answer, and where each of them stands.	Reviewer, HR
Notes	The reviewer’s own working notes.	Their author, and HR through break-glass
Rating	The confidential assessment: proposal, final rating, calibration, scores.	Reviewer, HR
Sign-off	The sign-off state, the timestamps and the employee’s own comment.	Everyone

A row of smart buttons sits above them: My Answers opens the part of the questionnaire you personally have to fill in, Objectives the employee’s objectives, Development Actions the plan, Meeting the review conversation once one has been scheduled, and Review History this employee’s other reviews.

Opening the review¶

Click Open the Review. This is the moment the review becomes real, and a great deal is fixed in place:

the reviewers are snapshotted from the employee’s management line, together with the department and the job position. If the employee moves department in March, the review opened in February still says where they were and who reviewed them.
the questionnaire version and the rating scale are stamped, so that a new version released next week does not rewrite a review already in progress;
the objectives of the period are pulled in — the ones whose dates overlap the review period;
the questions each person has to answer are created;
one to-do is placed on each participant’s own record — never on the review, so that the employee cannot see who else was asked;
the unfinished development actions of the previous review are copied in, marked as carried over;
the opening mail goes out.

Opening is refused, with a message saying which, when the employee has no manager, when no questionnaire can be resolved, when the questionnaire found has not been released, or when no rating scale can be resolved.

Tip

After launching a cycle you have a list of drafts. Select them all in the list view and click Open the Reviews. Whatever could not be opened is reported by employee name and reason, and the rest are opened.

The self-assessment¶

The employee gets a mail and a to-do. On their review, they click Fill in my part (or the My Answers smart button) and answer the questions addressed to them. Answers save as they are entered; nothing is submitted until they say so.

When they are ready, they click Submit my Self-Assessment. If a required question is still unanswered, the submission is refused and the missing questions are named.

Submitting freezes those answers. From then on the employee can still read them but no longer change them; only an HR officer can correct a submitted answer, and it is recorded that they did.

Note

Self-Assessment Progress on the review shows how much of the required part is answered, so a reviewer can see whether it is worth chasing without reading anything.

The manager assessment¶

The reviewer answers their own part the same way, and additionally sets the proposed rating on the Rating page, on the confidential assessment. Submit the Manager Assessment is refused without it: a review with no rating is an opinion that was never committed to.

Preparing well¶

Four things on the form exist to make the assessment about facts rather than about the last three weeks:

The objectives of the period, with every dated check-in behind them.
The previous plan, on the first page: what was agreed last time, and what came of it.
The reviewer’s working notes, on the Notes page — what you wrote down in March, when it happened. A note belongs to its author; another reviewer does not see it. Read Confidentiality on what a note is and is not before you rely on that.
The evidence panel. On the Evidence page, Show the evidence of the period gathers what was actually recorded about this employee between From and To from the modules that keep it — today, the check-ins on their objectives. Every entry is resolved with your own access rights, so the panel can never show a reviewer something they were not already entitled to read, and it will show an employee looking at their own review a shorter list than it shows their manager.

Important

Calibration happens on the confidential assessment, not on the review. If the final rating ends up different from the one the reviewer proposed, both are kept and a written reason is required. Neither the proposal nor the reason is ever shown to the employee. See Confidentiality.

The review conversation¶

The conversation is the point of the exercise; the record is the residue. Schedule the Review Conversation creates a calendar event attached to the review and fills in Review Meeting, after which the Meeting smart button opens it. The meeting belongs to the review: it is removed with it if the review is cancelled.

Hold the conversation around the release, not after it. An employee who reads their rating in a system before anybody has spoken to them about it has already formed their view of the process by the time the meeting starts.

Sign-off: acknowledged, or disagreed¶

Sign-off is not a statement that the employee agrees with the review. It is a record that they were shown it, plus room for what they think of it. Both outcomes close the review equally.

I acknowledge this review records that the employee has read and accepted it.
I disagree with this review opens a short form that asks for their own words, and refuses to record an empty one. A recorded dissent with no words in it would be worth nothing to the employee later, which is exactly when it matters. They write what they disagree with under My Comment and click Record my Comment.

Either way the review is locked, the moment is timestamped, and the employee’s own words are stored on the review, shown on the Sign-off page and printed on every copy of the review packet, including the reviewer’s and HR’s.

Important

Only the employee under review can sign off, and only through those two acts. There is no field a manager or an officer can write to say that an employee acknowledged something.

If an employee is slow, the reviewer can ask again: a sign-off reminder mail goes to the employee without disclosing anything new, since the review is already shared with them.

Closing the review¶

Close the Review finishes it. It is refused unless the review has been shared, and — when the cycle requires sign-off — unless the employee has signed off. A final rating is required.

Closing writes the employee’s last review and, if automatic planning is on, their next review date; closes the outstanding to-dos; runs the write-backs of the optional modules (competency levels, for instance); stamps the retention date; and locks the review.

The development plan¶

The development plan is what a review is actually for, and it is the part designed to outlive the review that created it.

Add one line per action on the Development Plan page: a Name, a Type (Training, Mentoring, Coaching, Stretch Assignment, Rotation, Certification, Reading, Other), an Owner, a Deadline, optionally a Cost and a link to an Objective. Under What we agreed, write what will be done and what good looks like.

As the action progresses, keep Status up to date and fill in What came of it.

Carry-forward¶

When the next review of the same employee is opened, every action still Planned or In Progress is copied onto it and marked as carried over, together with the outcome recorded so far. The next review’s first page is therefore Previous Plan: what we agreed, and what happened.

That is the mechanism that stops a development plan from being a promise made once a year and never mentioned again. An action that has been carried forward twice is visible as such, which is a conversation worth having.

Printing a review¶

Print produces the review packet: the employee, job, department, cycle and period; the questionnaire with the answers; the released rating; the development plan; the sign-off block with the employee’s own comment; and the retention date in the footer.

The same template serves everybody. The employee’s copy contains less than the reviewer’s, because the document only renders what its reader is entitled to see — the rating block, for example, is only present for a reviewer or an officer. There is no separate “employee version” that somebody could forget to keep in step.

Correcting a finished review¶

A signed-off review is locked. That lock is real: it is refused through the interface, through an import, and on the answers underneath it.

An HR officer can lift it with Unlock or Reopen, and either one asks for a Reason before it will do anything. The reason goes on the confidential log with their name.

Unlock leaves the review closed but makes it writable again, for a correction.
Reopen puts a closed review back into the shared state, where the employee is asked for their sign-off once more — the honest option whenever the correction changes something the employee was told.

Unlocking is refused once the review has reached its retention date.

Cancelling¶

Cancel is for a review that will not happen. It closes the outstanding to-dos and removes the review meeting. An officer can bring a cancelled review back to draft. A review that has already started cannot be deleted — cancel it instead, so the record of what was planned and dropped survives.