Performance Reviews, Goals & OKRs

Set up review cycles, launch employee reviews, and move submitted reviews through calibration, acknowledgment, and finalization.

The Performance module is a licensed add-on. If your company has it enabled, you'll find Performance Reviews, Goals & OKRs, 360 Feedback, Competencies, and PIPs in the navigation. What you can see and do depends on your permissions: submit_review supports self-service, view_performance enables management reads, and manage_performance enables administration. Company-wide visibility is a separate grant, view_all_performance.

This guide covers cycles and reviews. Related workflows are linked below.

Permissions at a glance

Permission	Who usually has it	What it allows
submit_review	All employees	Your own reviews, goals, OKRs, and 360 feedback (the "My" views)
view_performance	Managers, HR, finance	Read performance data within the caller's scope; company-wide access requires view_all_performance
manage_performance	HR managers, admins	Create review cycles, create and calibrate reviews, request 360 feedback, manage competencies and PIPs

view_all_performance or platform-admin access grants company-wide visibility. Otherwise the service resolves self and direct-report scope. Further rules:

• Department managers with view_performance only see reviews, goals, and OKRs for their direct reports, not the whole company.
• The Review Cycles tab requires manage_performance plus the UI's company-wide HR-operator check: manage_users, or both manage_employees and manage_payroll. This is derived from permissions, not role names. The cycle API separately checks manage_performance for writes.
• On reviews, calibration and finalization enforce team scope: holders of view_all_performance and platform admins act company-wide; other managers can sign off only on their direct reports.

Review cycles

A review cycle is the container for a round of reviews: a name, a date range, deadlines, and which components are included. You build it, launch it, then complete it once the reviews inside are done.

Creating a cycle

From Performance Reviews, switch to the Review Cycles tab and choose New Review Cycle. You set:

Field	Notes
Cycle name	Required, unique within your company
Frequency	annual, semi-annual, quarterly, monthly, probation, or ad-hoc (defaults to annual)
Start / end date	Required, the period the cycle covers
Rating scale	Max value on the rating scale, 2 to 10 (defaults to 5). Every rating recorded against this cycle (review ratings, calibration, cycle-linked goal ratings, 360 ratings) is scored 1 to this number
Rating labels	One label per point on the scale, e.g. "Needs Improvement" through "Outstanding" on the default 5-point scale. If you set labels you need exactly one per point, or the save is rejected
Custom questions	An optional set of your own questions (text, rating, or yes/no, each markable required) that reviewers answer on top of the standard fields
Eligible departments	Optional. When set, launching this cycle only ever reaches employees in these departments, whether you launch everyone or a picked list
Self-review / manager-review / calibration deadlines	Optional dates, editable later

Cycles also carry toggles for what's included: self-assessment and manager review are on by default; peer feedback and competencies are off by default; goals are on by default.

Once a cycle leaves draft, or picks up its first review while still in draft, its rating scale, rating labels, and custom questions are locked. Dates, deadlines, description, and eligible departments stay editable for the life of the cycle.

Cycle lifecycle

A cycle moves through these statuses:

draft -> active -> completed

Status	Meaning
draft	Being set up. Editable and deletable.
active	Launched and running. Reviews can be created and worked on.
completed	Closed out. Terminal: no more reviews, goal ratings, or 360 feedback can be written against it.
in-review / calibration / cancelled	Valid values in the data model, but there's no current action that produces them. A cycle only ever moves draft → active → completed today.

Key rules the system enforces:

• Only a draft cycle can be launched. Launching locks in the rating scale/labels/questions, flips the cycle to active, creates a self review for each eligible active employee when self-assessment is included, and a manager review only when manager review is included and that employee has a manager, and emits a cycle-started event.
• Launch takes an optional list of employee IDs to include; leave it empty to cover everyone eligible. If the cycle has eligible departments set, both the "everyone" case and an explicit employee list are filtered down to those departments: an id outside them is dropped, not an override.
• A cycle can be marked completed from active, in-review, or calibration. If any review in the cycle isn't yet finalized, completing is blocked with a count of how many, unless you confirm force complete: those reviews then lock permanently in whatever state they were in.
• Only a draft cycle can be deleted. The UI allows editing draft and active cycles; rating configuration remains subject to the lock described above.

In the cycles table, the action icons reflect this: edit on drafts and active cycles, launch on drafts, complete on active/in-review/calibration cycles, and delete on drafts only.

Performance reviews

Reviews live inside a cycle. Each review has a type and runs through its own approval flow.

Review types

Type	Who writes it
self	The employee, about themselves
manager	The manager, about a report (default)
peer	A colleague
upward	A report, about their manager

Review lifecycle

pending -> in-progress -> submitted -> calibrated -> acknowledged -> finalized

Status	What happens
pending	Created, not yet started. Can be deleted (by a manager) only at this stage.
in-progress	Being worked on
submitted	Reviewer has submitted ratings and comments. A submit event fires.
calibrated	A manager has adjusted the rating for consistency
acknowledged	The employee has confirmed they've read and discussed it. A completed event fires.
finalized	Locked and done

The transitions the backend allows:

• Submit is reviewer-only: only the person named as the review's reviewer can submit it. The one exception is a self review, where the employee is submitting about themselves. Allowed only from pending or in-progress; it stamps the submit time. Creating a non-self review (manager, peer, upward) without a reviewer is rejected outright. Otherwise nobody could ever submit it.
• Calibrate is allowed only from submitted, and only by a manager (manage_performance) over that employee. You set a calibrated rating (1 to the cycle's rating scale) and optional notes.
• Acknowledge is allowed from submitted or calibrated, and only by the employee. It stamps the acknowledge time and can carry an employee comment.
• Finalize is allowed from acknowledged or calibrated, by a manager over that employee.

What's captured on a review

Ratings are per-cycle: an overall rating plus optional goal and competency sub-ratings, each scored 1 to that cycle's ratingScaleMax (so 1–5 on the default scale, or whatever range the cycle was set up with). A rating outside that range is rejected. The narrative fields are strengths, areas for improvement, manager comments, and employee comments. Competency scores are validated the same way: one point per named competency, on the cycle's scale.

If the cycle carries a custom questions template, the submit page renders it as its own form on top of the standard fields: a required question blocks submission until it's answered, and a rating-type question is checked against the cycle's scale just like the overall rating is. Answers stay tied to their question by position, so once a review exists against a cycle, that cycle's questions (and its scale and labels) are locked: editing them out from under an in-flight answer would silently corrupt it.

Employee vs manager views

• Employees see My Reviews with summary cards (total, needs action, finalized, average rating) and can submit their self-review and acknowledge once it comes back.
• Managers and HR see a broader operations view with workload stats (total, needs action, submitted/calibrating, finalized) and the calibrate, finalize, and delete actions. There's also a pending sign-off list of reviews awaiting your calibration or finalization.
• If AI features are enabled for your company, managers get an AI review-summary action that drafts a summary across an employee's reviews.

Related performance workflows

See Goals, 360 Feedback & PIPs for goals, OKRs, anonymous-feedback visibility, PIP lifecycle rules, and competency setup.