Managing performance – 2 – reviews and performance periods

Just to be 100% clear – because it’s one of those terms that could mean several different things – a review in Talent is a formalised checkpoint between the manager and the employee, which gets recorded into the system. Several things are potentially recorded against a review – you might add in goals, to show the targets the worker was working towards, you (or they) might add activities or feedback to demonstrate progress. All these points of data get associated to the review. In a way, the review in Talent is a replacement for the old paper appraisal form. But because it’s so flexible, you can create reviews and review templates that are as simple or as detailed as you need. If all you want to do is record once a quarter that the manager and employee met and reviewed goals, then that’s possible. If you still have a large scale annual process, then that’s equally achievable.

Now… I might be stating the obvious here, but you don’t actually have to use the reviews functionality to do performance in Talent. You can get by using a combination of the performance journal and goals, and that would work fine. If you’re not using reviews, then you don’t really need to do the performance period setup. This is why you need to work out your process first.

‘Performance periods’ is something we all understand – but somehow we all seem to call it something different. Performance periods, review cycles, appraisal year, review period – mix and match your terms, it amounts to the same thing. How often do you conduct reviews, and when you do, what’s the bracket of time you’re looking at.

Performance periods get selected at the point of review creation – when you have to select the period which is being reviewed. The performance periods give you the default dates for the start and end of your review. This makes absolute sense if everyone works to the same dates – say your pay review for your entire workforce takes effect in April, and therefore your performance period runs January to December, or April to March. If you work people’s performance period off their start date rather than have everyone on the same calendar though (as plenty of companies do), that’s fine. Although selecting a performance period on a review populates some default dates, you can always override them.

Performance period is a mandatory field on review creation, so if you’re using reviews, you must create at least one performance period. Even if you just call it ‘ad hoc’ and put in nonsense dates. To create a performance period you need to visit Employee development > Links > Performance setup > Performance period (or just search for it like I do because I’m lazy and it’s easier than clicking).