Review cycles¶

A cycle is a wave of reviews: a stated population, dated stages, and reminders that chase exactly the people who have not acted yet. It is how you run a review round without keeping a spreadsheet of who has done what.

Cycles live under Performance ‣ Cycles ‣ Review Cycles and need the Officer access level.

Cycle types¶

Type	What it is	How reviews appear
Focal	Everybody reviewed at the same time, on the same period. The ordinary annual or half-yearly wave.	All at once, when you launch.
Anniversary	Each employee reviewed on their own rhythm, counted from their anchor date.	A daily job creates each review as it falls due.
Probation	The trial period. Counted from the contract rather than from an anniversary.	A daily job, working backwards from the end of the trial period. Needs the Hungarian pack — see Trial-period reviews in Hungary.
Continuous	A standing cycle for lightweight, recurring check-in conversations.	All at once, when you launch.
Ad hoc	A one-off wave outside any rhythm: a reorganisation, a new manager, a pilot.	All at once, when you launch.

Note

Anniversary and Probation create their reviews through a daily scheduled job, which is governed by a master switch: while Plan Reviews Automatically is off in the company settings, those cycles create nothing at all, however they are configured. See Configuration.

Setting a cycle up¶

Create a cycle and give it a Name that a manager will recognise in a reminder mail — 2026 H1 review, not Cycle 4.
In Scope, set the Type, the Period From and Period To — the period under review, not the period the reviews are run in — and the Company.
In Content, choose the Questionnaire (only released ones are offered) and the Rating Scale, then decide:
- Release Mode — The manager shares the review lets each reviewer release to their own employee. HR releases, then the manager shares holds every review until an officer acts, which is what you want the first time you run a cycle, or whenever ratings have to be calibrated across departments before anybody sees one.
- Signoff Required — whether a review has to be acknowledged or commented on by the employee before it can be closed. On by default.
In Population, write the Population Filter and, if relevant, a Min Tenure Days — employees whose anchor date is more recent than that are left out.
In Rules, set the Anonymity Threshold and the Retention Months for this cycle. Both fall back to the company settings.
Build the Stages — see below.

The population, and what the launch tells you first¶

Population Filter states who is in scope, as a filter on employees. It is resolved once, at launch, and the resulting list of employees is then stamped onto the cycle. Every review the cycle ever creates comes from that stamped list.

That is deliberate. A filter that is re-evaluated each time would quietly change the population of a running cycle every time somebody changes department, and no two runs would agree on who was supposed to be reviewed.

Before anything is created, the launch shows you exactly what it is about to do, in four groups:

The launch reports	What it means
Reviews to Create	The employees who will get a review. This is the number that matters.
Already Have a Review	They are in scope but already have a review in this cycle. Launching again never creates a second one for them.
Skipped, No Manager	They have no manager on their employee record, so nobody could conduct their review. Set a manager and launch again, or accept that they stay out.
Skipped, Minimum Tenure Not Reached	They have not served the minimum tenure this cycle asks for, counted from their review plan anchor date.

Read those four numbers before you confirm. The overwhelming majority of “the cycle went wrong” situations are visible here — a filter that caught a whole company instead of a department, or forty people with no manager set.

Important

A launch is idempotent. An employee who already has a review in this cycle never gets a second one, so a launch that was interrupted can simply be run again.

If the filter resolves to nobody who can be reviewed, the launch is refused and says so, rather than creating an empty running cycle that quietly does nothing for three weeks.

Stages and deadlines¶

A stage is a dated milestone of the round. Each one has a Code that says which part of the work it is about, a Name in your own words, and a Deadline.

Stage code	The work it stands for
Nomination	The employee proposes their raters (multi-rater rounds only).
Self-assessment	The employee has submitted their own part.
Manager assessment	The reviewer has submitted theirs, with a proposed rating.
Calibration	A final rating has been set on the confidential assessment.
Release	The review has been shared with the employee.
Sign-off	The employee has acknowledged the review or commented on it.

Blocks Next makes the stage a gate: while it is ticked and the work of that stage is not in for a given review, the work of a later stage on that review is refused. Use it to stop a manager writing their assessment before the employee’s self-assessment is in, when that is the order your process actually requires.

Tip

Set the deadlines with the conversation in mind, not the paperwork. The sign-off deadline should leave room for the meeting to have happened.

Reminders and escalation¶

Each stage carries its own reminders, on the Reminders page of the stage.

Field	What it does
Offset Days	When to send, relative to the stage deadline. Negative is before the deadline: -3 means three days early, 0 means on the day, 2 means two days late.
Audience	Whoever has not answered chases exactly the people who still owe something. The managers and HR go to the reviewers and to the officers instead.
Mail Template	Which of the reminder templates to send. See Configuration.
Escalate	Nobody, The manager or HR — who also hears about it.
Active	Untick to switch a reminder off without deleting it and losing its history.

A daily job sends every reminder whose stage deadline plus offset falls on today, working out the audience per review. Two reminders on one stage — say -5 and +1 — give you an early nudge and a chase, with different wording and different escalation.

Note

Every reminder mail is written into a log in the same transaction as the mail itself, which is what makes the daily job safe to run again: a reminder already logged is never sent twice, even if the job runs several times in a day. The log is on the Sent Reminders page of each reminder, so you can prove what went to whom.

Launching¶

Open the cycle and check it is in Draft.
Click Launch. The preview described above appears; read it.
Confirm.

The cycle moves to Running, the launch date is stamped, the resolved population and the filter that produced it are written into the cycle’s log, and one draft review is created per employee.

Reviews are created as drafts, and a draft review is not yet chasing anybody. Opening a review is what snapshots the reviewers, the department, the job, the questionnaire and the objectives of the period, creates the questions, and sends the opening mail — see Conducting a review. Select the drafts in the review list and use Open the Reviews to open a whole wave at once; whatever could not be opened is reported by employee name and reason rather than silently skipped.

What can no longer change¶

Once a cycle has been launched, its questionnaire, rating scale, period and population filter are frozen. Those are the things every review in the wave was built on, and changing them half-way through would leave two halves of one cycle that cannot be compared.

A launched cycle can no longer go back to draft, and a cycle that owns reviews cannot be deleted. Cancel it instead.

Tracking a cycle¶

The cycle form carries a Reviews smart button and a Completed one, a completion percentage on the list view, and a Reviews page listing every review with its employee, reviewers, due date, status and sign-off state.

For the wider picture, Performance ‣ Cycles ‣ Cycle Dashboard opens the completion analysis grouped by cycle and status. See Reporting.

Closing a cycle¶

Click Close when the wave is finished. The closure is refused while any review is still open, and the message says how many.

That refusal is on purpose: a cycle closed over twelve unfinished reviews is twelve people who were told they would have a review and did not get one. Finish them, or cancel them one by one so that the decision is recorded per person.

If you genuinely have to close over open reviews — a reorganisation made them moot — a Administrator can force the closure, and is required to state a reason, which is logged.

Cancel stops a draft or running cycle. Reset to Draft puts a cancelled cycle back, but only if it never produced a review.

Reviews outside a cycle¶

Not every review belongs to a wave. A reviewer or an officer can ask for one directly, at Performance ‣ Reviews ‣ Request a Review or from the employee list:

Employees — who is to be reviewed. A manager may only ask for the people who report to them; an officer, for anybody in their companies.
Questionnaire and Rating Scale — leave empty to fall back to the employee’s, the department’s and then the company’s.
Due Date — written on the review and on every participant’s to-do.
Additional Reviewers — the line manager is always a reviewer; anybody listed here is added. A non-officer may only add somebody who already manages the employee.
Message — posted on each review so that everybody involved knows why it was asked for. The employee reads it too.

The wizard refuses an employee with no manager, and refuses more than a hundred employees at a time — a request for two hundred people is a cycle, not an ad-hoc request.

Changing the reviewer¶

When a manager leaves half-way through a wave, an officer uses Reassign the Reviews. The new reviewer replaces the reviewer of record on every selected review; an assessment that has already been submitted stays attributed to whoever wrote it, and everything still pending moves. A Reason is required, and is written to the confidential log of each review together with the name of the reviewer being replaced.

Reviews that are already signed off and locked are refused by name: unlock them first, with a reason, if the reviewer really has to change on a finished review.