Customize Your Account with Preferences

Often, we get asked about 1 score for the employee’s review. Our application assigns a score to both Performance & Workplace Behaviors to create the matrix placement. Some organizations need to put this into 1 score to tie to compensation. In this case, we do not recommend averaging the two scores but rather enable the Overall Score feature. In this feature, we can help you assign a numeric value to each of the 16 boxes on the Performance-Values matrix. Once you have this assigned, the reviews and review tables will include the assigned number based on the matrix placement. You can then equate this number internally to a compensation percentage increase or bonus structure. Keep in mind, employees are able to see their Overall Score, but only after the review has been discussed and finalized by the manager’s signature. To enable this feature, please submit a Help Desk ticket or contact us at 888-505-0650.

This setting allows the manager to provide the details of their ratings and comments, digitally, before the review conversation happens. This is helpful for remote teams. The notes and ratings will be shown once the review is mark “complete” but before being signed by the manager (or when “approved” if approval is required). This is a Help Desk only setting. Please reach out to support to enable this setting.

Organizations that opt to hide the People Directory may also want to hide the Team Dashboard Card.

Originally developed for a Union based client, we agreed there may be other business cases where hiding the directory may be helpful or required.

Why hide the directory? If your organization has a business need that requires hiding the people directory. Keep in mind, when you hide the directory, you are also hiding Job Descriptions, Behavioral Profiles, and Personnel Records. (Personnel Records are only accessible to the Employee and users with higher access).

Some organizations may need to have the HR Department “approve” all reviews. This setting adds another step in the signing of reviews and has automated emails built into the process.

Why require approval for reviews? No matter the size of your team, if the HR / Owner would like to review all ratings and coaching notes prior to the review results being discussed and shown to the employee, enable this setting. This setting adds an additional two columns to the review table; Manager Completed and Approved.

Some organizations may want to allow Manager users, in addition to the Super users or Admin users, to approve reviews. Enable this option and all manager users above the Primary Manager for the employee can approve the review. (Require Final Approval to Finalize a Review must be enabled)

We developed a new role for HRBPs. This role allows a user to be assigned to a group of users without any of those users reporting directly to the Partner. This is currently a Help Desk setting. Please reach out for more details or to have this option enabled.

360 Internal Feedback can be anonymous or signed by the user completing requested feedback or giving unsolicited We default the feedback forms to be anonymous with the option for users to uncheck this option.

Why allow anonymous only? If you would like to require all 360 Internal Feedback to be anonymous and remove the option to have the user provide their name as part of their feedback. Keep in mind, employees do not see any 360 feedback unless the manager explicitly shares it with them. In the event you have elected anonymous only and still need to identify who submitted a specific record, we can do so per special request.

360 Internal Feedback can be helpful and in some cases, crucial in effectively coaching an employee.

Why include 360 in reviews? Relying on past emails or reviewing 360 feedback records in the 360 Internal Feedback summary can be challenging. Including these records in the review allows the manager to quickly access this feedback when evaluating and coaching an employee.

Enable this setting to allow the manager to attach selected 360 feedback records to attach to the review for the employee to access.

Some organizations want to promote ownership in the feedback process. This means the requested feedback provided would automatically include the employee’s name.

360 Internal Feedback can be anonymous or can be signed by the user providing feedback or completing a feedback request.

Why default the request to be anonymous? If you want to encourage your team to provide their feedback anonymously but still want them to have the option, save this setting. This is set as the default for all accounts.

Our “Give” or Provide feedback option can be powerful in letting your team provide unsolicited feedback. If your team is not yet ready or you do not want the team to have this option you will want to hide the Give option.

If you have selected to hide both Behaviors and Performance Objectives on 360 Feedback, then this option to Give Internal Feedback will be hidden. Giving unsolicited feedback is dependent on the Objectives and Behaviors, so without them, there is nothing to give feedback on.

Gathering feedback from teammates can be helpful when coaching team members.

Why hide 360 Internal Feedback? If you are not yet ready to extend the feedback process throughout the organization then consider hiding this feature and implementing it when you are ready.

External Feedback may be from clients, vendors or other users outside of your team. 360 External Feedback request can assist in determining who your Net Promoters are and how your team can improve. Create custom questions and decide whether objectives and workplace behaviors are also included in these requests.

Why hide external feedback? Hide this feature if your organization does not have a business need to solicit feedback from others outside your organization, is not yet ready to utilize this feature, or you have another system in place that gathers this type of feedback. Keep in mind, you can begin using this feature when your team is ready. Reference the Learn topic(s) for more details and training.

360 Internal Feedback is a powerful tool to gain insight from an employee’s teammates when coaching them. Our feedback request form as well as the “Give” feedback form includes both performance objectives and workplace behaviors assigned on the most recent review.

Why hide objectives? It might not be helpful to include an employee’s assigned objectives for others to rate. In some cases, objectives may be confidential to that employee and manager.

Similar to the Performance Objectives, Workplace Behaviors/Core Values can be included on a 360 Feedback form so that an Employee may be rated on them as a form of feedback.

This setting will only become available when the above “Hide Performance Objectives” setting is enabled. This may also be something that is private to the Employee/Manager, and therefore should not be included as an option for the 360 feedback form.

Most organizations work with the leaders and the managers to set the performance objectives for their team. This is helpful in ensuring the objectives and goals are results-oriented, whether they are a metric or project. Keep in mind, you must have this preference enabled and have created a review for the employee to have the create/edit objective capability. Employees are not permitted to create and assign their own workplace behaviors.

Why Allow Employees to Create / Edit Objectives? Collaboration is a powerful tool when building consensus and acceptance of change. Allowing your employees to create their own objectives provides the employees the opportunity to share what they feel is important to focus on and therefore be measured on.

Most organizations manage user access at the HR level, however, many want to engage their managers to take full ownership of their team’s performance management. Well, the ownership begins by adding the direct reports into the application. Enabling this feature gives manager users the access needed to do so.

A shared objective library is helpful when creating reviews. The list allows your managers to see shared metrics and objectives, create their own, or select from the list. In some cases, you may not want to have a shared library. By disabling the library, any objectives created will be saved to the review but not in the library list. The library function can be enabled later. Keep in mind, all objectives created when the library was disabled will not be included in the library list once it has been enabled.

Some organizations prefer the Human Resources department to handle all creation of performance objectives, workplace behaviors as well as creating the review forms. In some cases, this may be solely during the implementation process or for the life of the account.

Either way, selecting this preference will disable the Add Review option and the Manage Objectives and Workplace Behaviors option for manager users. Managers will still have the ability to edit a review to complete their star ratings and coaching notes as well as add/edit custom questions.

Check-Ins are the perfect compliment to the performance review, particularly if your review cycle is Semi-Annual or Annual. Rather than having one or two conversations annually, Check-Ins create a structure for more frequent coaching and feedback.

Why hide Check-Ins? If you have determined your team is not yet ready and instead needs time to focus on launching reviews, hiding Check-Ins may be necessary. When you hide Check-Ins, the main menu and Dashboard links are removed. Keep in mind, you can turn this feature on when ready and access the Learn topic(s) for more details and training.

We include an Employee Engagement Survey option in the Pulse> Survey menu. When users complete these surveys, their user ID is captured in the system. The Results report has the option to include or hide the name of the employee responding. In the Results report, the employee name is included, however, their name is not connected directly to their responses.

Why hide employee filters? This filter includes the employee’s name in the responses table. If you would rather have the survey responses be anonymous, saving this setting would improve the anonymity.

This and the next setting go hand-in-hand. The 5 star rating system and the Performance Values Matrix are designed to create a visual component of the review conversation.

Why hide the ratings or the Performance Values Matrix? This really comes down to organizational change and/or preference. If your team is not ready for the scoring system or would like to the ability to rate the team but fear the Matrix may be too much too soon, then hide enable this setting.

What happens? If you elect to Hide the Ratings, this will automatically hide the Matrix as well.

This preference is one we hope you do not use but understand when it is needed. Performance Reviews are one of the core parts of the application. However, we find not all organizations are ready to tackle Performance Reviews.

Why hide Performance Reviews? As mentioned, some organizations are simply not ready to tackle official reviews. In this case, you can hide the Performance Review feature and begin with Goals and Check-Ins. Keep in mind, this also be default hides the Workplace Satisfaction feature under the Pulse menu.

This and the previous setting go hand-in-hand. The 5 star rating system and the Performance Values Matrix are designed to create a visual component of the review conversation.

Why hide the ratings or the Performance Values Matrix? This really comes down to organizational change and/or preference. If your team is not ready for the scoring system or would like to the ability to rate the team but fear the Matrix may be too much too soon.

What happens? If you elect to Hide the Ratings, this will automatically hide the Matrix as well.

The application automatically includes a section about Personal Goals and Professional Development Objectives on every self assessment/review form. This is intended to prompt conversations about the employee’s personal goals and how the manager can help hold them accountable. These conversations help identify how the employee may contribute in ways outside of their normal job roles. Hide this section if you are not yet ready to include this as part of the review conversation. When your managers are ready and understand how to best conduct this part of the conversation you can include this section in future reviews.

The application includes a default Employee Engagement Survey. This survey can be sent at anytime and is a great way to get a sense of whether your team is disengaged, engaged, and even inspired.

Why hide the Survey feature? Some organizations may be using a different system to send and collect survey data or have customized survey questions. In this case, you may want to hide this feature. We offer a customization option for surveys. If you want us to customize a survey, please email [email protected] or reach out to your Account Manager.

We love our Workplace Satisfaction survey included on the employee self-assessment form. This includes three (3), short but powerful questions, giving organizations the opportunity to learn more from their teams. We also present these responses in a report view for leaders to quickly assess if any changes are needed.

Why hide Workplace Satisfaction on Reviews? This is truly valuable data, but if your organization is not yet ready to respond to the data collected from these three (3) questions, you may consider hiding this on reviews. You can enable this again later when you are ready.

Identify your organization’s next generation of leaders using the “nine-box grid’ is a leadership succession tool used to evaluate potential leaders and plot them on a matrix based on two factors: performance and potential.

Recognition helps create a culture of appreciation. This feature is enabled by design. If your team is not yet ready to engage with this feature you can disable it.

Empowering your managers to copy reviews as they sign off on the previous review is encouraged so the manager and employee review the upcoming expectations. Sometimes, this empowerment creates an issue at the HR level. If the HR team is charged with administering the review process and uses templates to create reviews for the whole team the copy option for managers can create unintended consequences – duplicate reviews. Enable this option to restrict managers from copying to reviews in the application.

Managing a large Performance Objective Library can be a big task. We encourage objectives to be written with some standardization in order to make the library more user-friendly. Use this preference if you would rather control the creation of objectives for your account to the Admin and Super Users. This will hide the library from the managers but still allow them to select from the list when creating or editing a performance review for their team.

If your organization creates and manages both Company and Department level goals then you have the ability to restrict Managers from entering Department level goals. This means your manager and employee users will only be allowed to enter Individual Goals.

Our Goals feature allows you to track cascading and agile goals, automate team updates, and easily report on the results.

What happens when you enable goals? Enabling this feature disables the more generic Goals section under Company > Purpose and enables a new main navigation option – Goals.

Goals are integrated with our Check-In feature which allows managers and employees to seamlessly communicate regarding performance and goal progress.

Goals DO NOT automatically take the place of performance objectives on the review. Managers have a consolidated view of current goals within the review but are not able to weight or score the goals. If you would like to include a goal or goals in the scoring process, you may elect to create a generic “Goal Attainment” performance objective and assign it to the review.

For employees the report will first load their 3rd level goals, then 2nd level, then 1st level. In order for the employee to have access to the goal report this setting must be enabled.

If your organization would like to assign importance to goals, much like we do with Objectives and Behaviors, then enable this feature. The Weighting is 1 – 4 with 4 being the most. This ties into a Goal Weighting report. Contact us for details on how to access this report.

Much like Performance Reviews, Goals may have an associated quarterly cycle or timeline. If you choose to include the ability to tag goals with the appropriate year and quarter, you can search and filter on this information in the tables.

Once goals are closed, you may want to restrict the ability to re-open the goal to only the Super Users or the Admin users.

Our cascading goal management features also allows you to track these goals based on a 4th level, which we call a category. You also have the option to select from one of the other label options: Perspective or Strategic Theme

Your organization may have many goals, particularly, if you are using the Full Goal feature with cascading levels.

The feature is designed with that in mind and pre-filters the results in the list and reports views based on the current calendar year.

If your organization prefers, you can use the Fiscal Year end (MM/DD) to adjust the pre-filter date range to better fit your organization’s needs.

If you select this option you will need to set the MM/DD in the field below the Goal settings.

The Goals feature includes a category option which is helpful in organizing Company Goals. The category is only set at the Company level with aligned goals inheriting the category. The application defaults the label as Goal Category label. We included two additional options: Perspective and Strategic Theme.

The Goals feature is a great way to track and communicate progress on cascading goals and agile goals. The application defaults the top level goal label as Company Goals. We included three additional options: Board Policy, Objectives, and 1st Level.

The application defaults the 2nd level goal label as Department Goals. We included two additional options: 2nd Level, Initiatives, and Objectives.

The application defaults the 3rd level goal label as Individual Goals. We included an additional option: Key Results.

Getting input from your employees on their career path is an important piece of Leadership Succession. Enabling this preference will allow your employees the chance to identify their desired positions on their self-assessment.

The Employee Identified Positions option includes two slots on the self assessment. One for Next Desired Position and one for Aspirational Desired Position. If you prefer to only track the Next Desired Position you can disable the 2nd field using this option.

This preference takes your leadership planning to the next level. When completing reviews as a manager, you can identify the next best position for the employee and what the next action is needed. These fields along with the Employee Identified positions feed into a Leadership Succession report for the leaders.

This is a user profile field to capture the relocatable status of the employee. Knowing whether the employee is open to relocating is helpful when making leadership succession and other promotion decisions. This is a yes/no field that can be updated by the managers on the People Directory or by the employee on their Profile.

In some cases, employees may have an active Corrective Action plan in place. Enabling this preference allows managers to track whether the employee has an active plan when completing the reviews. This information also feeds into the Leadership Success Report for leaders.

Often, the HR Department may create review and check-in templates to make setting these up easy for managers. The templates allow managers to quickly assign these to their whole team or as new employees join the team.

Why allow managers to manage templates? Enabling this preference allows managers to not only assign a pre-existing template, but also gives them the ability to create, edit, assign, and delete their own templates.

“Locations” is an additional tag on the user profile. Since not all organizations have multiple locations, this account setting is checked by default. If you would like to use Locations, update the preference and save your settings.

Why use Locations? If your organization has multiple geographic or even multiple buildings on a single campus, using Locations can assist in filtering your user data. When you enable Locations, you will have the ability to search and filter by locations in many places, such as the Employee Directory, Check-Ins, Performance Reviews, 360 Feedback Summary, Team Learning Plan and more.

This field captures the languages spoken by the employee. This information is helpful when making leadership succession and other promotion decisions. This is a multi-selector field that can be updated by the managers on the People Directory or by the employee on their Profile page. We only track which languages they speak, not their proficiency level or which language is their primary.

This is a user profile field used to capture the Employee ID of the user. Most organizations use this for Employee ID and in cases where your account is integrated with a payroll or HRIS system where this field is required.

The Performance-Values Matrix includes two axes, one to measure Performance (the Y Axis) and one to measure Culture (the X Axis). The application defaults the label for the X Axis to Workplace Behaviors. However, we included six additional options: Competencies, Core Tenets, Core Values, Cultural Beliefs, Cultural Values and Guiding Principles.

Scoring in the application includes a 1 – 5 star system. We default the definitions for each star as below. In some cases, organizations want to customize the terminology used for the definitions. Check the box to customize the legend and type in your definitions. Be sure to make sure the maths still apply with your definitions.

5 Stars = Outstanding; Performance is exceptional in all areas and is recognizable as a major contribution.
4 Stars = Good; Results clearly exceed requirements. Performance is of high quality and is achieved on a consistent basis.
3 Stars = Satisfactory; Competent and dependable level of performance. Meets expectations.
2 Stars = Improvement Needed; Performance is deficient in certain areas. Improvement is needed.
1 Star = Unsatisfactory; Results are generally unacceptable.

As part of the Workplace Satisfaction section on the self-assessment form (if not hidden on reviews) the first question provides the employee the ability to rate their satisfaction level. We default the responses: Very Pleased, Pleased, Content, Ok, could be better, and Frustrated. If you prefer to use another scale, check the box and type in your desired response scale.

Check-In email reminders are sent according to the frequency set for each Check-In. It is important for your team to receive these reminders during their day rather than being buried in their Inbox. Set the Company Time Zone and the time of day to receive these reminders. And for remote employees, timezones can be selected per user.

If you would like to use Due Dates and email reminders for your Performance Reviews, enable this feature and set the number of desired days before and after the Due Date. You can customize the email message as well. Just be sure not to change or delete the {} links. Due Dates are required to trigger these emails. If a Due Date has not been selected for a review – the email reminders will not be sent for the specific review record.