This article walks you through Evaluate Cycles and how to set one up. Click here to learn more about managing Evaluate Cycles once they have been set live.



Overview

Evaluate Cycles can be seen as your review periods, with one cycle for each review. 


Once you have created your Review Template, 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. 


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


Cycle Settings

  • Should employees Self-Evaluate?
  • Does your cycle require approval from HR?
  • Do you want managers to discuss Evaluate scores with employees in a session?

Audience

  • Decide which managers to include; is it a targeted cycle or one for the whole business?
  • Reviewers - who will need access to the data submitted. If Approval is required, who will need to do this?
  • If HR approval is switched on, you can choose who you want to review and approve score

 

  

Setting Up the Cycle

Within your Admin area, click on "Evaluate Cycles" and then click on the "+ Add Standard Evaluate Cycle" button, as shown in the screenshot below. 

  

  

Set your cycle name, please note that this naming will be visible to your managers and employees as the cycle becomes applicable to them. 

 

Cycle Settings: Details

 

Set your cycle settings as applicable. Please note, by default Manager Evaluation is enabled and you can choose from a list of optional settings, each of the settings is described below.

  

  • Do you want employees to complete a Self Evaluation?
    Enable this if you would like to have employees review themselves as part of the cycle
     
  • Do you want this cycle to be discussed with employees?
    If 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. 
      
  • Manager evaluations need approval (by a reviewer) before they can be discussed
    This setting will put manager evaluations through a review process by an OpenBlend Admin. This setting will stop managers from being able to discuss the cycle with their employees until the review has been approved by an Admin. This could be used for calibration for Pay Reviews, as an example. 
      
  • Employee Self Evaluation is hidden from managers until Discussion Session
    By default, once the employee has completed their self-evaluation, this will be visible to the manager during their manager evaluation. To avoid bias, you can use this setting to stop the employee self-evaluations being published to the manager before the conversation.  
      
  • 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 of the cycle. 

 

Due Date

The date that you would like to be communicated as the Due Date for the reviews to be due. Reminder notifications will be sent out to those who have not completed their review 1 week before this date and on this date. 


This could be the day you would like all written reviews to be submitted by.

 

End Date

The date that you would like to be communicated as the End Date for the reviews to be due. Reminder notifications will be sent out to those who have not completed their review 1 week before this date and on this date. 

 

This could be the day you would like all reviews to be discussed by (if applicable). 


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

   

" Save & Continue " 

 

Select Review Template
From the dropdown, please select the review template you have created. It is important to double check the questions at this stage, as once the cycle goes live, you cannot change the questions in the Review Template. 


" Save & Continue "
 
Managers
In this section of the cycle set-up you will need to include those who the cycle is applicable to. You have two options here, to either add in all employees and managers by selecting the "Add All" button or to singularly select individuals. 

 

If you need to select a group of people, rather than the whole organisation, you will need to search for the manager and make the cycle applicable to the manager to then apply this to the employee. 

 

You can singularly de-select employees who report to that manager, by clicking on the 'Mark as not applicable' 

 

Once you are done, click " Save & Continue "

  

Select Reviewers
If you have the Approval setting on, the individual(s) will be be granted access  and required to review and approve each submission. 

 

Regardless of wether the approval setting is enabled, the selected Reviewers will be able to export a CSV of all the responses.


Learn more about Approval for Evaluate Cycles. 


" Save & Continue "


Start the cycle! 

Once you have completed all the set-up stages, you can click the blue button at the bottom of the page to set your cycle live. 


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