Working with performance reviews

The Performance Review Templates page lists every performance review template your organization has created. From there, owners can edit, duplicate, close, or reopen a template directly from the list. After a template has been assigned to its population, this page also lets owners manage every worker's review in bulk, moving reviews between stages, deleting individual ones, reassigning a manager, or updating overall ratings for many workers at once.

The figure below illustrates the Performance Review Templates page:

List of review templates

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Review templates are available under Workbench > Performance Management > Performance Reviews > Performance Review Templates. Access to Workbench depends on your role within the platform. Everything on this page is scoped to a template's Owners and Local Owners: a Local Owner can access it but sees a narrower set of actions than a full Owner. A user who is neither an Owner nor a Local Owner sees no actions on the template at all.

Editing a review template

To edit a template, click the three-dot icon at the far right of its row in the list and select Edit. This is available for a template in the Draft or Published status. The Create performance review form opens, where you can make your changes.

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For step-by-step instructions on the performance review configuration wizard, see Creating a performance review.

Duplicating a review template

To create a copy of a template, select Duplicate from the same menu. This is available for a template in any status, but only to a full Owner; it is not offered to Local Owners. A new copy is created immediately, and a banner confirms it with an Open review button that takes you straight to the creation form for the new copy.

Deleting a review template

To remove a template, select Delete from the menu. This is only available while the template is still a Draft, and, like duplicating, only to a full Owner. Confirming the dialog that appears deletes your template.

Reopening a review template

To bring a Closed template back to the Published status and make template management possible again, select Reopen. This option is only available if your administrator has enabled review reopening for your organization. Because reopening can affect a process that already completed, the confirmation dialog specifically advises against changing anything that affects the template's layout or workflow.

Closing a review template

To close a Published template, select Close review. This is not available to Local Owners. Confirming moves all the reviews being part of this template to a closed state, except reviews in the Let's discuss or Challenge status.

Managing a review template

To open the review management page for a template, select Manage. Unlike the others above, this action only becomes available after the template has been fully assigned to its population, usually moments after publishing. Once it is, both full Owners and Local Owners can use it.

The management page includes three tabs: Move stages, Manage reviews, and Upload performance ratings.

You can return to the template list at any time by clicking Close in the top-right corner of the page.

Move stages

The Move stages tab lets you move a batch of worker reviews from one stage to another at once, for example, releasing a batch out of moderation or reopening a batch of closed reviews. The tab looks as follows:

Review-stage filter and move for Mid-Year Performance reviews

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A worker's review stage is separate from the template's own status covered above. A review moves through its own stages (In progress, Pending publication, Moderation, Pending sign-off, Closed, or Closed (system)) independently of whether the template itself is Draft, Published, or Closed.

To move reviews, proceed as follows:

1. Choose the current stage you want to work from in the Filter by review stage drop-down. You can only filter by one stage at a time here. Stages offered by default depend on the template. With moderation enabled for it, Moderation is offered first. For a goal-setting template, it defaults to Closed; otherwise, it defaults to Pending sign-off.

2. If needed, narrow the results further with Find workers by organizational unit, Find workers by their manager, Find workers by cost center, Find workers by country, or Find specific workers. Use the search fields or expand the drop-down lists to locate a specific filter. You can expand or collapse filters using the Expand or Collapse button in the top-right corner of the Filters section.

3. Click the button below the filters (it reads View all if you have not set any filters, or Apply filters if you have). You will then see a table, listing all matching reviews with a checkbox next to each and including details concerning the worker, organization, cost center, manager, etc. A line above the table confirms how many reviews are currently in the given stage.

4. Select one or more reviews. Then, choose where to move them using the New review stage drop-down list above the table. The options offered here depend on the stage you started from:

   • From Moderation, you can move to Pending publication (the conversation and publication stage) or to Closed (system).

   • From Pending sign-off, you can reopen back to In progress or move forward to Pending publication.

   • From Closed, a goal-setting template can reopen to In progress or Pending publication unless that stage is skipped for the template. Any other template can instead move back to Pending sign-off or Pending publication unless that stage is skipped.

   • From Closed (system), you can only reopen to In progress.

   • The Pending publication stage does not appear at all for a configured template to skip the conversation and publication stage.

5. Click Move reviews. A confirmation dialog will appear, summarizing the number of reviews affected and the stage they are moving to or from. To confirm, click the Move reviews button in the dialog.

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Rather than instantly, moves are processed in the background. With a large selection, some of the moved reviews may still briefly show their old stage if you reapply the same filter immediately. As there is no need to wait for it to finish, you can keep working elsewhere in the meantime.

Manage reviews

The Manage reviews tab is where you can view individual worker reviews belonging to the template, reassign one to a different manager, generate a PDF, or delete reviews that have not progressed far. The image below presents this tab:

Filters and worker list on the Manage reviews tab for Mid-Year Performance

Filtering and viewing reviews

Unlike Move stages, the Filter by review stage field here allows you to select several stages at once. The same additional filters are available (organizational unit, manager, cost center, country, or a specific worker). To expand or collapse filters, use the Expand or Collapse button in the top-right corner of the Filters section.

Applied filters appear as removable badges above the table, with a Clear filters option to reset all. If your organization has sensitive-content filtering enabled for reviews, an extra Search for sensitive content option is also available, letting you show all reviews, exclude ones flagged as sensitive, or include only the sensitive ones.

Click View all with no filters set. If you have chosen any, this button reads Apply filters.

The review table will be displayed. It lists results with the worker's picture and name (with a View review link and a badge if the review is flagged as sensitive), their Review stage, Global ID, Email, Organization, Organization external ID, Cost center, Country, Manager ID, and Manager. Clicking View review opens the worker's review, including details such as the review's name, description, type, status, stage, participants, goals, etc. The same view option is also available in the Move stages tab.

Deleting reviews in bulk

Select one or more reviews using the checkboxes. Next, click Delete selected above the table. Only reviews that are still In progress, Not started, or Pending publication can be deleted this way. Confirming the dialog with Delete reviews removes them permanently.

Reassigning a manager

For a review still at In progress or Not started, click its row's three-dot icon and select Reassign manager. In the pop-up window, type the new manager's name in the New manager search bar. Click the relevant person's name in the search results and Reassign.

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The new manager gains every permission and action the previous manager had, so double-check the selection before confirming.

Generating a PDF

From the same icon, Generate PDF is available regardless of the review's stage. A preview window opens with a filename built automatically from the worker's name, the template name, and the review's creation date. The preview window offers Print PDF, Open in a new tab, and Download PDF buttons. Its content mirrors what can be found on the review's own page, so depending on the template and review stage, the generated PDF can include the review's details, useful information, goals, behaviors, etc.

Upload performance ratings

Setting an overall performance rating one review at a time becomes impractical when a cycle covers a large population. In the Upload performance ratings tab, you can update ratings for every review in scope at once: download a file, fill it in offline, and upload it back. To do so, proceed as follows:

1. In the Upload performance ratings section, click the Download template button to generate a CSV file. The file includes every review currently in your access scope, including ones you cannot otherwise edit, such as those already closed or awaiting sign-off, so you can use them for reference or comparison.

   Each row contains:

   • Employee ID, the worker's internal ID.

   • Manager ID, the manager assigned to the specific review, which can differ from the worker's regular manager if the review was reassigned.

   • Review Stage, shown for reference only. It reflects the stage at the moment you downloaded the file and is not used by the system when your upload is later processed. See Understanding validation below.

   • Overall Performance Rating, pre-filled if a rating already exists (including one a manager has saved as a draft but not yet published) or left blank if there are no ratings.

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If translations are configured for the rating scale, the label displayed in this column is selected according to a defined priority: the user's own language, followed by the template's language, then the company's default language, and finally any translation that exists.

2. Edit the Overall Performance Rating column in the downloaded file for workers you want to update and save the updated file.

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You can enter a rating in any language for which the rating scale has a translation configured. Matching disregards case and leading or trailing spaces, so the entry does not need to match the on-screen display exactly.

3. Click the Upload performance rating in the same Upload performance ratings section to upload the file back.

See an example of performance ratings uploaded:

Bulk rating template download and upload history

Understanding validation

Two checks apply once you upload a file:

• A file-level check examines the file's structure. If a required column is missing, renamed, or otherwise incorrectly formatted, the entire file is rejected and no rows are processed. You will get a downloadable file explaining the reason.

• A row-level check is then applied to every remaining row independently. A row that fails this check is skipped without affecting the rest of the file. Common reasons a row fails include: the employee that cannot be found, the employee ID or manager ID missing, the listed manager no longer matching the review's actual manager, the rating value not matching any option on the scale, the review falling outside the user's access scope, the review that reached a stage at which ratings can no longer be changed, or the same employee appearing more than once in the file.

The stage-related check evaluates the review's current stage at the moment the file is processed, rather than the Review Stage value recorded when the file was downloaded. A review that has since moved into Pending sign-off, Closed, Let's discuss, Challenge, or Moderation with manager editing disabled no longer accepts a rating update, in the same way it could not be edited directly.

A row that passes overwrites the previous rating. Ratings can only be updated through this process, not cleared: submitting a blank cell in place of an existing rating does not remove the value but causes the row to fail.

Reviewing the result and upload history

Once processing finishes, a banner at the top of the page summarizes how many rows were updated, rejected, or left unchanged, with a Download log file link providing full details. The banner remains visible until you leave or refresh the page. After that, the same information is only available from the upload history described below.

The result log records every submitted row as one of three outcomes: updated successfully, rejected with a reason, or left unchanged because the submitted value already matched the existing one, including a blank row matching an already-blank rating. This third outcome is what makes re-uploading the same file safe: rows that have already been processed are reported as unchanged the second time instead of being reprocessed.

Below the upload area, the Upload history table keeps a record of every file uploaded for the template, including who uploaded it, the file itself, its result log, the upload date, and how many rows were Updated, Rejected, or reported as No changes. Every owner can see this table in full, sorted with the newest upload first. However, you can only download the original file or result log for uploads you personally performed. Someone else's row still shows the counts, but not a working download link. This keeps the audit trail complete without exposing worker data beyond what you are authorized to see.