Table of Contents
Setting up a review template
1. Base settings
2. Scope – who is assessing the reviewee?
3. Questions
4. Visibility
5. Timeline
6. Notifications
7. Confirmation
Kicking off a review cycle based on the template
1. Selecting participants
2. Adjusting the timeline
3. Completing setup
4. Draft mode in a cycle
What are review cycles?
By creating a performance, 360º, leadership, or project review in Leapsome, you are launching a review cycle. A review cycle is a specific timeline of steps that asks for feedback from different teammates based on the scope and timeline you define as an admin. Once you determine the review questions, the timeline of the review, and who is to be assessed, Leapsome automatically handles sending the right questions to the right people at the right time.
This article describes how to set up a review cycle, from creating the template to launching and using the template to start a review.
If you need recommendations or guidance on which type of assessment you should run, check out our best-practice blueprint for reviews.
Note: Are you setting up a review automation? Then you may also look into our automation framework for probation period assessments.
Setting up a review template
1. Base settings
To create a new review template (used at any time to launch a review cycle), go to the 'Reviews' tab > 'Templates,' > 'Create Template.'
Name
The name of your review template will show up in all notifications related to your 360°, performance, or leadership assessment. Pick an easily identifiable name, such as '360° Performance Review'.
Description
The description is optional and can contain the reason for the assessment or general guidelines for giving good feedback. All participants will see this description when filling out their assessment.
Owners
These are people that will have access to the review cycle's analytics and settings. By default, the person creating the cycle will be the first owner, and you can add as many owners as you like.
Please note: At this stage, you can define if HRBP's should have access to the review cycle and should see the progress of employees that are assigned to them. If the option is enabled, HRBP's can edit contributors (e.g. peers), but can not make any other changes or add participants.
2. Scope – who is assessing the reviewee?
Leapsome offers three customizable best-practice assessments:
- Performance Review: In this scenario, each employee will write a self-evaluation and will be assessed by their manager. After the assessment, the employee will discuss the results with the manager and sign the results digitally.
- 360° Assessment: This assessment adds the perspective of peers and direct reports of the person being assessed (the reviewee) if they have any. While direct reports are automatically pulled from your employee directory, peers can be 'nominated' by the reviewee or the manager and can be either internal colleagues or external collaborators. You can also define the minimum / maximum number of peers required for a reviewee. You can also limit the number of times someone can be nominated as a peer in a given review round to avoid any one person needing to provide too many peer assessments.
- Leadership Assessment: This scenario enables upward feedback towards managers. Each participant (manager) will write a self-evaluation and can be assessed by direct reports or nominated peers.
As you can see below, the scope (i.e., those included in writing an assessment of the participants in the cycle) consists of several customizable settings. This allows you to adjust the scope to the needs of your company.
By turning on self-assessment, every participant in the cycle will need to assess themselves.
By turning on managers, the managers of every participant in the cycle will assess the participant (reviewee).
By turning on direct reports, if any participant in the cycle has direct reports, all of the direct reports will need to assess the reviewee.
By turning on peers, every participant in the cycle will either nominate or be assigned peers who will write an assessment of the reviewee.
Suppose you've turned on the 'Peers' option. In that case, you can then determine who chooses the peers. They can be nominated by the reviewee; approved automatically or by the manager; selected by the manager or the admin of the cycle; or external to the company. For peer-only feedback cycles, managers do not need to be included in the scope in order to be enabled to approve the peer selection.
Please note: If only peers are selected in the scope, and no settings for peer selection are selected, then admins can manually select the peers for the participants without input from the employees or managers.
When the manager assessment has been turned on, in the tab 'Visibility', you will also determine whether managers should share the results at any time once they have completed the review. Disable this if you are running calibrations and if you wish to control when managers can share their assessments. This can be re-enabled after calibration.
To prevent the signing of assessments and keep calibration possible, please also leave the 'The manager and the reviewee need to sign the review after sharing it to permanently lock them' unchecked in the 'Timeline' tab of the review settings. This box can be checked off after calibration is complete to allow signatures, if desired.
Project assessments
By default, line managers will assume the manager role for their direct reports included in the review cycle. If you want to replace them with project managers for a specific cycle, enable the option 'Manually selected project manager' and select the person that will assume the project manager role. Instead, this person will give the manager feedback for the participant (that person can also be chosen when actually launching the review and can be left blank when creating the template).
Manager settings
By turning on the manager assessment, you will also determine whether managers can share the results at any time once they have completed the review (this becomes available in the tab 'Visbility'). Disable this if you are running calibrations and if you wish to control when managers can share their assessments. This can be re-enabled after calibration.
You can choose to automatically update the manager if the reporting line changes during the cycle. With this setting active, managers will be updated immediately within the cycle, when they are updated in the 'Employees' section. Read this article on what can be changed in an active review cycle.
If your teams have users with additional managers, you can select the setting 'Include all additional managers in the review scope,' if you would like those additional managers to also assess their reports in the review cycle.
3. Questions
Watch this video to get a detailed guide on setting up the questionnaire.
Using your Competency framework
Before you set up your first assessment, set up your competencies & values. You can then compare these scores across people and time to help understand where specific teams or people need help and see how employees are improving over time.
Competencies can either be company-wide (applicable to anyone in the company) or team-specific (applicable only to members of specific teams).
By turning on 'Team-specific competencies,' the system will recognize which team a participant in the cycle is on and prompt people to review them on those team competencies. For example, both sales and marketing teams could be participants in the same review cycle, but they would be assessed on different team-specific competencies. To enable Team-wide competencies, click on 'New question' and select the question type to be 'Team-specific competencies'.
Leapsome will include your current set of defined competencies when you activate the cycle.
Please note: If you change / edit an existing competency in your Competency Framework, these changes will apply to all previous / ongoing cycles!
Base questionnaire and role-specific questions
This step allows you to define the questions asked during each assessment. Perspectives differ and might require different questions. That's why each question can be flexibly targeted.
For example, you can include a question in the template that the manager will only see and answer. To choose which people will respond to which question, click the drop-down menu 'Ask the question to' under the question and select the desired target group.
To compare perspectives effectively in the analytics module, we recommend targeting different groups with the same question (i.e., asking peers, managers, direct reports, and reviewees the same question to see how their responses differ).
Adding custom questions
You can also add custom questions to your assessment. These questions can be open-ended, multiple-choice, or rated (on the default or a custom scale). Here are a few best-practice questions you can use.
Please note: If you change an existing question in a template, this will change that question in all past / current cycles which contain this underlying question!
If you add or remove a question from a template (or change the order of questions), this will not affect existing cycles!
Adding private questions
By adding a custom question, you have the option to enable private questions by checking the box 'Make private (only manager and admin can see the question and the response; The question will not be visible to the reviewee in their self-assessment)'. Answers to private questions are only visible for admins and the manager (of the reviewee). They can be recognized in the assessment by a lock icon next to the questions. The reviewee will not see the answers to these questions.
Please note: Total scores won't be displayed to reviewees if private questions are included in the review questionnaire.
Display questions
A review cycle can include specific teams or all teams within the company. However, you might want to specify relevant questions to specific users or teams, while still housing the data within the same review cycle. Display questions create the ability to achieve this.
To add a display rule to a question, in the 'Questions' tab of the template/cycle, click on the below-highlighted button 'Display rules' to open the display rules window.
Here, you will have the ability to make the question visible to all employees or selected teams, users, locations, etc. If you select a specific team - then only that team will see the question. The remaining review participants will not.
Including goals
If you're using Leapsome's goal module, you have the flexibility to incorporate goals into your assessment cycles based on the role of each participant in the progress towards those goals. This allows you to include goals that a participant owns, contributes to, manages as a key result owner, key result contributor, initiative owner, initiative contributor, or goal manager. This level of granularity enables you to accurately evaluate each reviewee's contribution, ensuring that their efforts toward achieving the results are acknowledged and recognized.
To view a participant's progress in their assigned goals during a review, simply click on the corresponding goal. This action will direct you to the related page within the Goals module, where you can view additional details and comments.
Customizing the default scale
You can modify the scale for all scaled questions by choosing the option to weigh questions at the bottom of the questions section. We recommend defining a default scale for all cycles in the admin settings and not changing it for each review. Changing it for one review will normalize all of your analytics to 100. You can also decide whether you want to hide numbers and only show labels in the reviews.
4. Timeline
Defining a timeline
Before a kickoff, you will pre-define a timeline for your template. The platform will use this to automatically send emails to all participants and reviewers, reminding them to complete their reviews by the appropriate deadline. Be mindful that the timeline will be calculated in calendar days, not business days, for each stage in the cycle.
The actual steps and dates will depend on your cycle setup (i.e., the inclusion of self-evaluations, 360° assessments, and manager assessments). You can edit these steps during the assessment process, so don't worry if you're not sure about the best intervals right away.
Please note: Leapsome uses soft deadlines, meaning participants can continue to write their assessment even after a deadline has passed and until the review cycle has closed.
Receiving automated reminders
While the dates mark the official kick-off of each step, the platform manages the process as efficiently as possible. If a process step completes earlier and all prerequisites for the next step are met, it will automatically move to the next step.
5. Notifications
All review notifications will be sent out by Leapsome automatically. You can customize each message's text and provide translations to relevant languages. There are three types of notifications in reviews:
Review kick-off: All participants of the cycle will be notified as soon as the cycle starts.
Review Daily Digests: Next to the cycle kick-off, notifications start being sent two days after kick-off. Peer approval notifications are only sent after the peer nomination deadline passed.
All participants with new tasks will be notified. There are no notifications if there are no new tasks.
Review Reminders: All participants with overdue tasks (tasks opened for more than three days and fewer than 75 days) will be notified on Tuesdays. There are no notifications if there are no overdue tasks. Notifications start at least two days after kick-off.
6. Visibility
Changing the visibility and anonymity settings
The final step of the cycle set-up will be defining what an admin, managers of participants in the review, and the participants themselves should see and when. You can choose different levels of anonymity (for example, hiding the contributor's name from the participant but showing it to the owner of the cycle).
When setting the assessments of peer results or direct reports to anonymous, there are two options.
'Anonymous (separate results)' means that the score and comment of each person are shown, but their name is not associated with the score / comment.
'Anonymous (aggregated results)' means that the total average score from those peers / direct reports will show in the radar chart at the bottom of the review, but their individual ratings on specific competencies or questions will not be displayed in the radar chart(you'll need at least 2 answers from peers to show peer scores, and 2 answers from direct reports to show direct report scores). You can see more on this here.
Please note: Participation in a review does not necessarily mean default visibility for the reviewee of the assessment. For example, if a peer submits a peer assessment on behalf of a colleague, the reviewee will only have visibility of that peer review if visibility is provided in the visibility settings. They, therefore, would only have access to view the review that they have written.
Additionally, manager assessments can't be made anonymous.
As a last step, you can determine whether the managers can share their assessments or if you wish to temporarily block them from doing so by checking off the box 'Block managers from sharing the review results manually'. This is useful if you want to run calibrations or control the time when assessments are shared with employees. Make sure to uncheck this setting after calibration is done so that managers can share their reviews. Assessments that have already been shared will continue to be visible to the reviewee.
7. Confirmation
If you're satisfied with your settings, you can confirm the template setup by clicking 'Save template.'
Kicking off a review cycle based on the template
Once you have finalized your review template, you can easily kick off your review by clicking 'Launch new cycle' next to the template name:
You will have the option to review each of the steps you set up in the process described above. In addition, you can select the participants (reviewees) and the concrete timeline for the cycle.
Important note: It is very important that you finish a review cycle set up in one instance (instead of multiple instances). While the Leapsome platform does have an auto-save function for saving any changes made to the draft of the review cycle, it is possible the Leapsome platform only auto-saves the first draft so later changes made to the draft might not be saved and it might lead to launching a review cycle that might not reflect your intentions around participants, scopes, questions or any new changes you've made.
If you need input from teammates or happen to finish set up in a second instance, you can leave the draft as is, and then create a new review cycle based on the template, and copy-paste any custom sections and descriptions, questions, notification emails, etc.
Once you are ready to launch a review cycle, and you've already set up your template, watch this video to launch your cycle!
1. Selecting participants
Participants are the employees that will be assessed in this cycle. You can add all employees to a cycle or filter by adding or excluding employees using these selection options:
- By team
- By individual user selection
- By location
- By level
- By contributor type
- By custom attribute
You can also exclude based on tenure. For example, you can include employees who have been with the company for more than X weeks, meaning anyone with the company for less than X weeks at the time of the cycle kickoff, will not be reviewed.
Please note: If employees are excluded from the cycle based on tenure, then they will also be excluded from providing assessments to their managers as a direct report and would need to be added manually to the manager's assessment in the cycle dashboard, in order to provide upward feedback.
Peers will be nominated after your cycle kicks off. Each participant's manager and direct reports will be pulled from your 'Employees' settings (if you're using one of our HRIS integrations, this data is auto-synchronized). If the manager changes before kick-off, it will be updated accordingly.
If no manager is defined, the platform assumes that the cycle owner will write the manager assessment.
2. Adjusting the timeline
When setting up the timeline for the review cycle, you'll get a suggested start date and subsequent dates based on your settings from the template. In the cycle, you can still edit each date.
3. Activate the cycle
You will end your journey at the last tab called 'Visibility'. At the bottom of it, you will see 'Save as draft' and 'Activate' options. If you feel ready to launch the cycle - click 'Activate'.
4. Draft mode in a cycle
Before the kick-off of a cycle, you will have the option to go back to the draft mode of the cycle and edit the settings. Within the draft mode, you can change the participant inclusion/exclusion criteria. However, if participants were already added to the cycle and they were now excluded through the criteria that were changed via draft mode, they will not automatically be removed. Instead, you would need to manually remove the participants from the participant list if they are now part of the exclusion criteria. Similarly, you can launch a new cycle with the new participant inclusion/exclusion criteria if the change in the participant scope adds too much manual work.
Please note: If you make changes to the participant or contributor list in the current status of the cycle, and then go back into draft mode, then all manual changes will be lost. Therefore, please ensure making the changes to the participant list after making any changes to the participant scope in draft mode.