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Conducting formal reviews is an important part of any performance management cycle. Admin creates an evaluation cycle and then it is ready in the employee's profile so they can prepare for their review conversation.
Creating a review cycle
To create a review cycle as Admin, first go through the following steps:
Go to Reviews in the menu and then click on the Review Cycle tab.
This page shows an overview of all review cycles that have been created. You can filter here by active or archived cycles, by clicking on 'Show filters'. Using the 'Create Cycle' button you can create a new evaluation cycle.
💡 The coach can also, provided this option is activated, create reviews for his team members from the 'Team' environment or from the Review page under the 'Review cycle' tab.
📚 Read more about creating a review as a coach here.
To create a review cycle, you will need to complete the 5 steps of the creation process below.
Step 1: Choose a template
When you go to create a review cycle, you always start by selecting a review template.
💡 When creating review questions, you were able to specify who should answer each question. When you select a template, you can see at a glance who will be asked to provide feedback.
❗️Note: After selecting the template, do you see that peer feedback is requested but you do not want it. Then you need to edit this in the question. To do this, go to Reviews - Themes - open the theme where the question was added and edit it.
At the top right of the page, decide which languages you want to create the template in.
💡 Give the review cycle a unique name. For example: End of Year Review 2024. This will make it easier to find, even if you have sent out multiple review cycles.
Step 2: Select the employees
Next, select the employees who will participate in the review cycle. For each participant, the primary job and coaches are automatically selected. This is copied from the team structure.
You can make changes per employee at step 2. To do so, click on the employee and a pop-up will appear. This allows you to customize the jobs to evaluate and distinguish between the coaches who must provide input (the review coaches) and which coaches are present at the meeting (guests). By default, guests are the employee's coaches, but it is also possible to add other colleagues from the organization.
❗️Note: Coaches who have not been added to provide input and/or attend the evaluation will not have access to the employee's report by default. Unless an Admin has checked this under the privacy settings in step 3.
💡 Use the full-screen view to make all mutations at once in the focus screen.
Step 3: Settings
In the third step, settings regarding the cycle, notifications and privacy can be determined.
General settings
Below is an overview of the settings for the review cycle, and what these settings are for:
Participants are asked to schedule review | Through this option, added guests are given a task in Learned to set a date and time for the physical conversation with the employee. |
Calibrate | The calibrate option was built for review coaches. This option allows input for an employee to already be shared with any other coaches of that employee and the Admin, but not yet with the employee himself. This way, internal “calibration” can be done to ensure that a fair review is given. |
Digitally sign | This activates the option to have all review participants sign with a digital signature. |
Automatically archive | This setting automatically archives and closes the cycle. This will also clean up any open tasks neatly. |
Overall rating | With this option, you activate that the overall rating of the employee is shown in the evaluation report. This is based on the coach input and is only shown when a template with theme weightings is used. |
*By default, only the automatic archiving option is activated.
Notification settings
Determine how many notifications are sent out to participants regarding their tasks.
By default, 3 notifications are sent out:
On the day of the start date of a task
7 days before the deadline of a task > reminder to employees who have not yet completed a task.
On the day of a task's deadline > reminder to employees who have not yet completed a task.
❗️Note: You set task start dates and deadlines in the next step.
💡 Reminders are sent only to those who have not yet completed the task.
Privacy settings
By default, employees, guests and coaches selected for a review can view the review report.
You can choose to make the report viewable to all current and future coaches. Useful if there are upcoming shifts in the team structure.
*The option to allow all (current and future) coaches of an employee to see the report is disabled by default.
Step 4: Determine the schedule.
In the final step, determine when employees will be invited to the evaluation session and when the deadline is. Before doing that, set what that invitation will look like.
Invitation Messages
Set up an invitation message in the needed translations. This text will also be added to the email invitation to participants and additionally displayed on the initial screen of the review.
💡 You can save your invitation message so that you can reuse it next time. You also have the option to add different invitation messages so that you can select an invitation message for each type of conversation.
Invitation messages can be managed in the Performance product settings. 📚 Read this article more about working with invitation messages.
In addition to being able to create different invitation messages in advance in the Performance product settings, you also have the option to customize when creating the evaluation round and message. You can have the modified message overwrite the old message or save it as a new message.
Planning the tasks
Depending on the template you selected, the staff, coaches, and any peers will start writing their reviews.
At this step, you determine when each task will become available by setting a start date. Next, determine when the task must be completed by setting a deadline. You do this for all tasks.
You can choose to use the automatically generated timeline here, based on the start date.
💡 If 360 degree feedback is turned on for the review, as Admin you can write an instruction for inviting the peers. For example, that there is a maximum or that they can only invite peers from their own department.
Step 5: Do a final check
Arriving at the final step, Learned offers the opportunity to do a final check on everything you set up in steps 1 through 4 before you publish the evaluation round.
Press the 'edit' button to adjust the settings at any of the steps.
Publish or save as draft
When everything is set up correctly, you can publish the review cycle. This means that the review cycle is available to employees from the selected start date. The tasks to write reviews are also sent out.
You can also choose to keep the review cycle as a draft. In that case, employees, coaches and guests are not yet invited and you still have the opportunity to change something about the settings of this cycle. But also to the templates, job profiles and team structure.
❗️Note: Changes to the review template, the (selected) jobs and the team layouts will no longer be reflected in the already activated review cycle. Should you choose to save the cycle as a draft, you can make the changes first and publish them later.