Goals & Review Cycles

This page describes goals, review cycles, the fairness check and what HR can do while a cycle is running. Goals and reviews are included from the Team plan. This page is part of the reference HR Records, Time Off & Reviews.

What It Does

• Goals. A goal has a title, a period, a due date, a status, a progress bar and an optional weight. It is seen by the person, anyone above them in the reporting line, and HR. A manager can add goals for the people who report to them.
• A review cycle. HR writes up to 12 questions, asked of both the person and their reviewer. Launching creates one review per active person in the audience, with their manager at that moment as the reviewer.
• Nothing is seen before it is shared. The reviewer cannot read a self review that is still a draft, and the person cannot see the reviewer’s answers or the rating until the reviewer shares the review. Submitting locks a half; only HR can reopen it. Nobody reviews themselves.
• Optional parts of a cycle. Feedback from up to 8 colleagues the reviewer asks; calibration, where HR sees the submitted ratings side by side and releases them before any reviewer can share; and a rating for each goal, which is a guide and does not set the overall rating.
• The fairness check. On a launched cycle with ratings, HR can compare how ratings fall across groups made from job facts already on the file, such as department, level and location. The app itself describes it as a first screen, not a finding.
• While a cycle is running. Once a cycle is launched, its questions, rating switch and audience are fixed; the name and due dates can still change. Closing a cycle stops all writing and sharing; reviews already shared stay visible to the people they belong to.

Goals (Included From Team)

People keep their own goals in My WorkMy Goals. A goal has a title, an optional description of what done looks like, a period, a due date, a status (“On track”, “At risk”, “Done” or “Dropped”), a progress bar and an optional weight. Setting progress to 100% marks the goal done, and the other way round.

• Who sees them. The person, anyone above them in the reporting line, and HR. A manager can add goals for a report and update them from My WorkMy Team. HR sees them on the “Goals” tab of the file: read-only with the permission to view employee files, editable with the permission to manage them. Nobody else can see a person’s goals.
• Example goals. HR keeps a list of example goals in HR & TalentHR Settings. People adding a goal can start from one. An example is wording only: changing or deleting it never touches anyone’s goals.
• Weights. The weight is how much a goal counts when goals are rated in a review. Weights do not have to add up to 100.

Review Cycles (Included From Team)

My WorkReviews shows each person “My reviews”, and reviewers “Reviews to write”. People with the permission to run review cycles do so from HR & TalentReview Cycles, where “New review cycle” is. For the step-by-step, see the guide Run a review cycle.

The Fairness Check

On a launched cycle with ratings, HR can open “Fairness check”. For each grouping it compares the share of people rated 4 or 5 with the best group’s share; a ratio under 0.8 (the “four-fifths rule”) is marked for a closer look. A further column says whether the gap could plausibly be chance (Fisher’s exact test at the 5% line, after allowing for every comparison in the report). On a calibrated cycle it also shows how often each group’s rating was lowered in calibration.

• Groupings come from job facts already on the file: department, level, employment type, location, length of service and reviewer. Two groupings can be combined in one run.
• Groups of fewer than 5 rated people are not shown.
• No protected characteristic is read from the employee file. To check one, HR pastes a one-off list of email, group lines for a single run; the list is used in memory and never stored.
• “Save this check” keeps the tables as they are (group totals only, no names). A saved check cannot be changed or deleted, and can be downloaded as a PDF or a CSV file; each download is recorded.

What HR Can Do In A Cycle

“Progress” shows who is where, with “Read”, “Assign” or “Reassign”, “Reopen self” and “Reopen review”. Opening a review to read it, opening the calibration view and every calibration change are recorded in the audit log. HR’s own review is left out of the calibration view, and an HR user cannot read the reviewer’s half of their own review before it is shared. Once a cycle is launched, its questions, rating switch and audience are fixed; the name and due dates can still change. Closing a cycle stops all writing and sharing; reviews already shared stay visible to the people they belong to.

If something here is not working as you expect, start with When something goes wrong.

Permissions Behind This Page

Where the sections above say who may see or do something, this is the permission that is checked. What each permission allows is listed in HR Records, Time Off & Reviews.