This guide walks through creating a performance cycle, configuring its settings, and managing it through to completion.

Owner or admin permissions are necessary to create and manage cycles.

To start creating a performance review cycle, you’ll need to follow these steps:

The top-left corner has three tabs: Details, Timeline, and Questions.

In Details, configure the settings for the schedule type:

Choose who should participate in the review cycle. You can filter based on several different options. These include:

Without any filters, all active employees are enrolled by default.

You can include up to four different types of reviews in your cycle:

Decide whether the reviewee (subject of the review), the manager, or both can view submitted feedback for each review type. For example, if you don’t want a reviewee to see feedback written by their manager, you wouldn’t select Reviewee.

There are two visibility settings for when a reviewee and/or manager can access feedback:

The second setting means that the admin chooses when each participant can view their feedback, rather than it being dependent on when the reviewee or manager submits feedback. After the admin publishes feedback, this closes the review process for that participant, and no further reviews can be submitted for them.

If you’ve included Peer review, you will see a section where you can select whether the reviewee or manager chooses the nominees. You can set a minimum (1) and maximum (20) number of peers to be selected per reviewee.

In the top-left corner, open the Timeline tab to access the review cycle’s deadlines.

From the cycle start date through to the end, you can set deadlines for each review type based on the number of days after the cycle is activated. These deadlines structure the review timeline and trigger automatic email and Slack notifications to either the reviewee or their manager, depending on the review type.

The number of days includes weekends.

Deadlines are set as a number of days after a reference date. The reference date itself is not counted as day one.

The reference date depends on the cycle type:

If all review types are selected, the review timeline will be in the following order by default:

In the top-left corner, click Questions to access each review type’s set of feedback questions. You’ll see a tab for each review type, Manager review, Self review, Peer review, and Upward review.

The builder works like a Workflow form, drag and drop form elements from the side panel to build your review. Also, choose from different styling options, such as text area, divider, and header.

Click any review field to edit its title and placeholder text, configure hints and requirements, or hide it from the reviewee. To remove a field, select Delete.

By default, manager and self reviews will have an optional Performance rating section added at the bottom of the review. However, a performance rating field can be added to all review types.

Scale fields let reviewers add a numeric rating alongside written feedback. You can set this field to a minimum of zero and maximum of 20.

If you want multiple weighted scale questions to contribute to an employee’s overall performance rating rather than a single rating question, use our weighted scale fields for manager reviews.

It’s not possible to use a combination of both weighted scale questions and a singular performance rating question within a manager review.

Follow these steps to set up multiple weighted scale questions:

Once reviewers submit their responses, the system calculates a weighted average of the contributing scale question scores. This score is mapped to the company’s existing performance rating levels as set in Settings > Performance > Ratings.

When finished with the first draft of your performance review, click Leave in the top-right corner. The cycle will remain in Draft mode and you can return at any stage to continue editing.

To learn more about scheduling an upcoming review, read our guide Overseeing an active performance review cycle.

Once a cycle is active, the template can still be edited, but some changes are destructive and cannot be undone. Here's what you need to know before making changes:

Questions can be removed from the template of a running cycle. Doing so permanently deletes any responses that reviewers have already submitted for that question. Deleted responses cannot be recovered, so make sure any data you need has been exported first. To export existing responses, open the Reporting tab of the cycle and click Download CSV.

New questions can be added to a running template. They appear as blank (unanswered) in all reviews, including ones that have already been submitted. If you want reviewers to answer the new question, open each submitted review and click Request changes so the reviewer can resubmit.

Titles, descriptions, and placeholder text can be edited live without affecting any existing responses.

Marking a field as Required after reviews have been submitted does not apply retroactively — existing submissions stand. Marking a field as Hidden from reviewee does apply retroactively to both submitted and in-progress reviews.