Performance reviews

Learn what a performance review is, how one arrives with your employee data, where you edit or delete one, and how to read a rated employee’s answers. You need the System Admin or Total Rewards Admin role.

What a performance review is

A performance review is one round of ratings, in your own words: a name, an as-of date, and the rating options you use, ranked highest first — the top option is your best rating, such as Exceeds, Meets and Below, or whatever your process calls them. Every employee holds at most one option per review, or the review’s Not rated entry — its own name for someone the review doesn’t rate, which you can rename from the default.

A workspace can hold more than one review. The latest one — the review with the most recent as-of date — is what a new merit cycle plans on by default. See Building a merit matrix or pay guidance.

Bring a review in

A review arrives only by importing employee data; there’s no button to create one by hand. When your file’s rating column carries a value, the import review has you name and date a brand-new review or add to one you already have, and place every value from the file in rating order, before you approve. See Importing employee data.

Questions and answers

A review file can carry more than a rating. Load one whose columns go beyond work_email and performance_rating, and each extra column becomes one of the review’s questions, in the order the file lists them, with each employee’s cell under that column becoming their answer to it. The Performance reviews page shows a review’s own list of questions on its card, and says None when the review has none.

Open Employees on a review’s card to read every rated employee’s rating alongside their answers, one column per question. A long answer clamps to two lines; hover it to read the whole thing. A review with no questions shows ratings only, with nothing to answer.

Answers are read-only, and only a System Admin or Total Rewards Admin sees them, not a People Manager, and never on the worksheet. Correct one by importing the review again with the corrected file; there is no edit control for an answer or a rating here.

Starting a review-scoped import

Select Import review results, on a review’s own card to add to that review, or on the Performance reviews page’s empty state to start a brand-new one, to upload a file built for this: work_email and performance_rating, plus a column for each question the review should carry. The import lands on the same import review page any other import does, with its rating decision already fixed to the review you started from when you started from one. See Reviewing an import for what happens next.

Edit a review

1. In the sidebar, under Organization, select Performance reviews.
2. On the review’s card, select the pencil to rename it, change its as-of date, or rename its Not rated entry, or select the list icon to rename, reorder, add or remove its rating options.
3. Select Save.

Removing an option you’ve already saved doesn’t remove the employees who held it — they read as Not rated on the review, on every cycle that hasn’t launched yet.

Each review’s card also shows how many employees are rated on it, and which cycles plan on it.

Delete a review

On the review’s card, select the trash icon, and confirm. A review a cycle still plans on can’t be deleted; point that cycle at another review first, in the 3. Guidance section of its Setup tab. Deleting a review clears every employee’s rating on it, and can’t be undone.

The latest review on the record

The people directory and an employee’s record show their rating from the most recent review that still rates them — the latest as-of date whose options still carry the rating they hold. The tooltip on the rating names which review it’s from. An employee with no rating on any review reads with a dash, distinct from Not rated on a review that does rate them.

A rating is visible to administrators only until you open it to another role. See Configuring field-level permissions.