This article explains how to manage a performance review cycle using the Performance Review Cycle Builder in Personio.

Tip To read more about Performance Management and how it can support the retention of talent, visit our website and read our Attraction Plus Whitepaper or take a look at our Performance Management Guide.

View and edit cycles

Access cycles

Your access rights determine which cycles you can view and manage. To learn more, read View and edit access in the Performance & Development area.

To access an overview of all the review cycles and see their status, go to Performance & Development > Cycles.

The possible cycle statuses are:

- Draft: The review cycle has not been launched yet, and you can keep editing it.
- Scheduled: The cycle is scheduled and the first activity hasn't started yet.
- Live: The review cycle has been launched, and it is currently ongoing.
- Closed: You are finished with this review cycle, and you have closed it.

View details for a specific cycle

To view the details of a specific review cycle, go to Performance & Development > Cycles and then click on the name of the relevant review cycle. A table displays which shows the required review types and their status.

Note Supervisors can only view their direct reports and their relevant review statuses in a review cycle. They can also navigate to the Performance overview of their direct reports, and request peer feedback, by clicking on the three dots located to the right.

A review can have one of the following statuses:

None assigned: No reviewer (peer or supervisor) has been assigned yet for the review type.
Not started: There is no content in the feedback form that is attached to the review.
In progress: There is draft content in the feedback form that is attached to the review, but it hasn’t been sent yet.
Submitted: The reviewer sent the feedback.
Sharing allowed: The employee managing the cycle has activated the option to share the review with the recipient. This status applies to sent manager reviews only.
Shared: The review has been shared with the recipient (in the case of a manager review) or with the supervisor (in the case of a self review).
Not applicable: For Manager reviews, where no manager is assigned.
Select reviewer: For peer reviews, you need to manually select the reviewer.

Edit activities and participants in a live cycle

You can edit different aspects of an ongoing cycle. You can rename it at any time, and you can do the following:

Edit activities

Navigate to Performance & Development > Cycles. Click the relevant cycle.
In the cycle details view, click Edit cycle.
Under Activities, you can edit:
▶︎ The activity start date (if the activity hasn't started) and its end date.
▶︎ The activity reminders.
▶︎ The sharing and confidentiality settings. Changing these settings only affects reviews that have not been submitted yet.
▶︎ The activity form template.

Note that you should change form templates only when absolutely necessary. When you change a form template for an ongoing activity:

Personio assigns new reviews to the cycle participants, using the new template.
Personio saves previous draft and submitted reviews as Discarded, in the reviewer's Feedback page.
Reviewers with draft or submitted reviews receive a notification about the above changes.

Edit participants

To add employees to the cycle, or to remove them from it, follow these steps:

In the cycle details view, click Participants.
Change the filtering rules as needed, to include or exclude participants.

To use the filters, you need access to all the corresponding employee attributes ("Office", "Department" etc.). Configure this under Settings > Employee roles > Access rights. Verify that you have access rights for all the employee profile sections containing the attributes (for example, HR information).

After you remove an employee from the cycle, the following applies:

They are removed from all scheduled and ongoing activities.
They can still access their draft and submitted reviews, under Performance & Development > Feedback. Their submitted or shared reviews still appear in the cycle export.
If the removed employee is their supervisor's only direct report for an ongoing cycle, the supervisor loses access to the cycle.

Review changes in the company structure

The cycle builder automatically detects changes in your company structure that affect the cycle participants. If you are the cycle owner, it sends you a notification in your inbox, alerting you about the changes you need to review.

In the cycle details view, under Changes to review, you can see the following.

Changes in employee status

See employees that are now eligible to participate in the cycle. You can decide to add them to the cycle: if so, they participate in scheduled and in progress activities only. They do not participate in activities that have ended.
See employees that are no longer eligible for the cycle. You can either leave them in the cycle or remove them. If you remove them, the same conditions apply as when editing participants.

Changes in employee's supervisors

If an employee changes supervisor, you can ignore the change and leave the old supervisor in the cycle. If instead you add the new supervisor to the cycle:

The new supervisor can view the cycles of their new direct reports under Performance & Development > Cycles.
The new supervisor can write the relevant manager reviews, and nominate employees for peer and upward reviews.
The old supervisor loses access to the cycle, but they can still access their draft and submitted reviews under Performance & Development > Feedback.

Edit reviews

Depending on the status of a review and the status of the review cycle, a review can be edited or not.

Status	Notes
Closed review cycle	After a review cycle has been closed, the status of a review changes to Locked, and it is not possible to edit it anymore.
Review in draft	A review that is still in draft can be edited at any time. See below how to edit a review.
Sent review	Manager review: Can be edited even after it is sent, as long as the cycle is open. Peer reviews, Self reviews, and Upward reviews: Once it has been sent, its status changes to Locked (not editable). Only Personio Administrators, the receiver's supervisor, and employees with edit rights for cycles and cycle reviews can Unlock the review to allow editing.

To edit a review that has not been sent, or that has been unlocked, follow these steps:

Go to Performance & Development > Feedback.
Under the heading To do, click on the relevant review.
Make the necessary changes in the relevant form fields. Your changes will automatically be saved.

Duplicate, close or archive a cycle

Duplicate a cycle

To duplicate a cycle, follow these steps:

Go to Performance & Development > Cycles.
Click the three dots icon next to the relevant cycle. Select Duplicate cycle.
Choose the new cycle's name and the start date of the earliest activities. Click Duplicate.

Personio duplicates participants and activities from the original cycle.

It also mirrors the activities position in the timeline. For example, if Manager reviews are one week after Peer reviews in the original cycle, the new cycle follows the same schedule.

Close a cycle

You can close a live cycle at any time:

Navigate to Performance & Development > Cycles. Click the relevant cycle.
In the cycle details view, click Edit cycle.
Click Close cycle. Confirm your choice.

After you close the cycle:

All incomplete tasks for employees related to the cycle are removed.
Draft and completed reviews are saved, accessible, and locked.
In-progress reviews are moved to a discarded status but remain accessible under Feeback.
It is no longer possible to reopen and configure the cycle.

Archive a cycle

You can archive a closed cycle, which hides all review data created as part of the cycle from employees and admins:

Navigate to Performance & Development > Cycles. Click the relevant, closed cycle.
In the cycle details view, click Edit cycle.
Click Archive cycle. Confirm your choice.

You can unarchive the cycle at any moment.

Analytics and reporting

The Analytics tab

The analytics tab displays all ratings received by employees in their manager reviews. Supervisors determine these ratings when answering scale questions in the review form.

The tab provides you with an overview of the employees' performance within a cycle. By filtering the data, you can identify positive trends and potential issues at a glance.

Note
The analytics tab shows no results, if:
▶︎ The are no manager reviews in the cycle.
▶︎ There are no scale questions in the manager review form. Learn to configure question and answer types in the performance feedback form templates.
▶︎ No supervisor has submitted a manager review yet.

To view the data for a specific cycle, follow these steps:

Go to Performance & Development > Cycles.
Click on the relevant cycle.
Select the Analytics tab.
To filter the data, click Filters and apply the filters as needed.
To choose how to visualize the data, click the box under Char type and select either Column or Box grid.

The Column chart

With the Column chart, you can view the distribution of the ratings received by employees in the cycle, for one question in particular.

Under Select a question, choose a scale question from the manager review form template.

You can see the ratings distribution at a glance, for the selected question.

The Box grid

Note
If you want to use the Box grid, your manager review form needs to contain at least two scale questions.

The box grid shows the distribution of the employee ratings from two different scale questions.

You can choose one scale question for the horizontal axis of the grid, and another scale question for the vertical axis. The combined ratings of both questions determine the position of each employee on the grid.

For example, you can display attitude-related ratings on the horizontal axis, and performance-related ratings on the vertical one:

Top performers appear on the upper-right hand side of the grid, while employees with lower ratings are displayed on the lower-left side.

Tips
▶︎ To see which employees belong to each box in the grid, click on the bubble that indicates the percentage. The participant list below the grid updates accordingly.
▶︎ The box grid is useful when assessing employee performance and potential for growth. Learn more about this powerful instrument.

The Summary tab

The Summary tab provides a summary of the cycle's details. The tab shows:

▶︎ The cycle's General details:

The cycle's Launch date.
Sharing configurations: it indicates if you activated the option to share Manager reviews with the relevant reports.

Tip Find out more about sharing options for Manager reviews.

▶︎ Aggregated Details by review type. For each review type in the cycle, you can see:

The review's due date.
Whether the review can be shared with the relevant report or not (this applies to Manager reviews only).
The selected form template.
Any upcoming reminders.

Export all cycle data or a single review

Performance Cycle Review Data can be downloaded in an Excel file. The file includes both quantitative data (all ratings received by employees in the cycle) and qualitative data (all answers to open text questions regarding the employee's performance). You can use this data for reporting, or share it internally.

Go to Performance & Development > Cycles and click on the name of the relevant review cycle.
In the top right, click Export the reviews in this cycle.
Click Export File to confirm that you want to export the data.

You have the option to export a single review to the employee's Documents tab, or to download it as a PDF file:

Go to Performance & Development > Cycles and click on the name of the relevant review cycle.
The cycle details page opens. Next to the relevant employee, click the relevant Shared or Submitted review.
The review details page opens. On the top right, click Export.
Choose whether you want to export the review to the employee's Documents tab, download it as PDF, or both. Tick the relevant checkboxes.
Click Export.

Notes
▶︎ Reviews that haven’t been shared with the reviewees cannot be exported to their Documents section.
▶︎ Reviews that have been shared confidentially will have n/a in the reviewee name field of the pdf.

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Manage a Performance Review Cycle