Cycle setup: Creating the questionnaire

The questionnaire is by far the most important piece of an assessment cycle, after all it defines the competencies and questions that your employees and managers receive feedback on. 

In Leapsome, you can flexibly set up the assessment questionnaire and target it to the right people. 

To do so, go into your template or cycle and navigate to the 'Questions' section. 

Creating sections 

On the bottom of the page, you can 'Add (a) section title', e.g. for all company competencies. Via drag and drop, you can add questions or question blocks to the respective section. 

Please be aware that 'empty' sections, sections without competencies and/or related questions underneath such as instructions, for instance, might get hidden later in the actual review, as certain questions are displayed dynamically for particular roles and the empty section above would then no longer be applicable.  

Including competencies

Check the option 'Include general competencies for all participants to include those competencies when the cycle is activated. If you make a change on the competency setup page, future copies of that template or cycle will automatically include the updated set.

Check the option 'Include team-specific competencies based on the team membership of the reviewee' to include them based on team membership at the time of cycle activation. If you make a change on the competency setup page, future copies of that template or cycle will automatically include the updated set.

Please note: If a competency is listed as a Specialist Team-Specific competency, then only members of the same team will be able to view and assess those competencies. Therefore, the admin would only be able to preview those competencies in the questionnaire if they are also included in those specific teams. 

If you don't want to include all of your general and/or all of your team-specific competencies you can click on 'Pick manually'. You'll see a list of all your competencies and can delete the ones you don't want to include. You can translate your competencies into most languages your users might use. Find out how to translate competencies here.

Including goals

If you use the Leapsome goal module, you can incorporate assesing your employee's performance on their goals managed in Leapsome. Via 'select goals to include' you can choose the criteria to determine which goals should be included. By default, this is set to individual goals that are active. You can include goals based on...

• Participant role (goal owner or contributor, key result owner or contributor, initiative owner or contributor, or Goal Manager (for team/company goals only)
• Goal Tags (e.g. Q1 2023)
• Purposes (business goal, personal development goal)
• Cycles
• States (active, draft, archived)
• Goal create drate

As long as the review cycle is open and the reviews have not been finalized by the Manager and/or Reviewee, any newly added goals matching the criteria will automatically be pulled into the ongoing cycle. By default, the reviewee and their manager are asked to provide a mandatory rating and an optional comment for each goal.

Please note, that goals will not show in the 'Preview' of the questionnaire.

In the example above, all active and archived business goals from the cycle Q1 2023 would be shown where the user is either goal, key result or initiative owner. Personal development goals with these criteria would not be shown. 

Adding custom questions

In addition to competencies and goals, you can 'Add new question(s)' at the bottom of the page in the 'Questions' section, e.g. some of our best practice questions for reviews. These questions can be translated, so you can display the review in the language your users prefer. Find out more here. 

Please note: If you change an existing question in a template, this will change that question in all 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!

Answering formats

Default scale

Make sure to set up a default scale for assessment before setting up your first template or cycle. If you choose either the setting 'Score required' or 'Score optional' the question(s) can be answered on that scale. 

Custom scale

Should you need a different scale than your default assessment scale for a specific template or cycle you can set it up by 'Edit(ing) the default scale (...)' in the 'Question' section of that template or cycle. Results on the 'Analytics' view will be normalized on a 0-100 scale if you run cross-cycle analytics in this setup.

When editing your scale, you also have the option to 'Hide numbers and only show labels' in your cycle. 

Free text answers

Choosing 'No score' means that the question(s) can be answered with a free text only. In this case, you should decide on either 'Comment required' or 'Comment optional'. 

More than one scale & multiple-choice questions

It's also possible to use more than one scale and even multiple-choice questions for an assessment, you'll find more details about this here. 

Private questions

You can include private questions into the review questionnaire, that are only visible for and can only be answered by managers and peers (not to the reviewee). In the results overview, the answers to those questions can only be seen by admins and managers, not by anyone else.

Targeting questions to reviewer groups

In some cases, not all reviewers (i.e. the reviewee, their manager, their peers, their direct reports) need to answer every question. Thus you can define who should answer which question(s) by checking or unchecking the respective options.

Weighting questions

Out of all structured questions within your questionnaire, Leapsome calculates an overall score for each participant and each perspective (e.g. a manager score of 3.2). Normally, all structured questions weigh the same towards the calculation of that score. If this doesn't accurately represent your framework you can add custom weights to your questions. Read more about this here.

Questionnaire preview

You can preview questionnaires for specific employees and perspectives (for example, the manager perspective for an employee in the marketing team).

Please note that the preview displays a reduced version of the questionnaire — some interactive elements, level descriptions, and goals will only be added in live questionnaires.

Please also keep in mind that specialist team competencies (i.e. team-specific competencies that can only be assessed by members of the same team) will only show in the preview, if the person requesting the preview is member of said team. Due to this, you may not be able to preview the full list of team-specific competencies for people outside of your own team(s).