Overview

Evaluate Cycles are our way of allowing you to formalise your employee review periods, with one cycle for each review. 


Once you have created your Scoring Systems and Forms you can go ahead and set up the cycle for your review, setting the applicable managers and employees and the due dates and end date for the review period (cycle). 


Here are some things for you to consider before you start setting up your cycle:


Settings: 

  • Do you want employees to complete a self-evaluation review? 
  • Do you want an evaluation to be between an employee and their manager?
  • Do you want any employee self evaluations to be hidden from their manager until their next 1:1 discussion? 
  • Should manager evaluations be calibrated (reviewed) by someone else in your organisation before they can be discussed? 


Audience: 

  • Decide which employees to include; is it a targeted cycle or one for the whole business?
  • Reviewers - who will need access to the data submitted. If calibration is required, who will need to do this?

 


Setting up a cycle 

1. Within your admin area, click on 'Evaluations' and then select '+ Add standard Evaluation'


Details: 


2. You can then populate the necessary fields, below we have explained the settings in more detail: 


  • Please note that your cycle name and description will be visible to your employees and managers when the cycle goes live

  • Employee self evaluation - Enable this if you would like employees to review themselves as part of the cycle


  • Do you want this cycle to be discussed with employees? - If employee self evaluation is enabled, this is enabled by default. You can select this option without Self Evaluation, to allow the manager to discuss and publish a 'manager only' review cycle to the employee. 


  • Employee self evaluation is hidden from managers until their next 1:1 discussion - By default, once the employee has completed their self-evaluation, this will be visible to the manager as they complete their manager evaluation. To avoid bias, you can use this setting to stop the employee self-evaluations being published to the manager before the 1:1.  


  • Manager evaluations need calibration (by a reviewer) before they can be discussed - This setting will put manager evaluations through a calibration process by an OpenBlend Admin. This setting will stop managers from being able to discuss the cycle with their employees until the calibration has been approved by a reviewer. As an example, this could be used for calibration for a pay review. Download our full guide to calibration here. 


  • Send an email to inform managers and their reports that the cycle has started? - This setting will send everyone who is applicable, the email notification to let them know when they have a new cycle to complete. If you choose not to check this, you will need to ensure that you email out to your employees and managers to inform them that the cycle has started. 

 

If employee self evaluation is selected, you will be prompted to provide an employee self evaluation due date, alongside a manager evaluation due date. Your end date is the day you would like all discussions to be completed by. Reminder notifications will be sent out to those who have not completed their review 1 week before this date and on this date. 


Please note, the end date will not automatically close out the cycle, so managers and employees can still submit their review after this date if needed. 


Form: 


3. Here you can create a new form, or load (and edit if needed) an existing form you have created



Participants: 


4. You can now select your participants for the evaluation cycle, by clicking on their names or using the filters provided



Permissions: 


5. You can then assign permissions to other individuals in your organisation who can view progress and calibrate the individuals review cycle. You can do this by selecting the name of the individual, clicking on 'Adjust permissions' and then typing the name of the person you'd like to view progress or calibrate. To add them, simply click on the '+' icon



Summary: 


6. You will then see a full summary of your evaluate cycle. At this point you can also use the 'Delegate' feature to assign other people to be able to edit and discuss someone's evaluation. When you are happy with your cycle, click start. 


Please note: Once you have set the cycle live, this will automatically publish the cycle to all applicable managers/employees and a notification will be sent to all if the "Send an email to inform managers and their reports that the cycle has started?" setting is enabled.