Performance: goals, appraisal cycles, manager reviews and feedback

#Purpose and scope

This chapter covers the Performance Management module: appraisal cycles, goals and the goal tree, appraisal forms with their self and manager sections, and peer feedback. Employees work from My performance; managers from Team performance; HR from the Performance menu.

#Before you start

1. The Performance Management module installed and its feature on.
2. Employee records with managers set, and each user linked to their employee record. Without a link the employee pages say “No Employee record linked to your user — ask HR to link.”
3. The Performance home page lists Cycles, Goals, Goal tree, Appraisals, Feedback and, for administrators, Feedback abuse audit.

#1. Appraisal cycles

1. Open Cycles and create a cycle: name (for example H1 2026), period start and end, self-review due date, manager-review due date and status (Open or Closed).
2. Edit or delete a cycle from the same list. Set its status to Closed when the cycle ends.

#2. Goals and the goal tree

1. Employees add goals in My goals with a title and an optional weight from 0 to 100. A new goal starts Active. Use Mark achieved, or Reopen to put it back to Active. Goal statuses are draft, active, achieved and missed.
2. HR sees every goal in Goals, filtered by employee or status.
3. Open the Goal tree to see goals aligned under parents (OKR style). Drag a goal onto a new parent, or use the Move button, or drop it on the root area to detach it. Orphan goals are shown separately. The tree can be exported to CSV.

#3. Appraisal forms: self review and manager review

1. An appraisal form belongs to a cycle and an employee, with a manager. Its status goes draft, self-submitted, manager-reviewed and finalised.
2. Self review: the employee saves a self rating and comments and submits it, which sets self-submitted. The self section is locked once the manager review has started: “Self section locked once manager review begins”.
3. Manager review: open Team performance, choose a cycle and open a report’s form. The manager sets a rating (Exceeds, Meets, Below or Unsatisfactory expectations), a final rating A to D (Exceptional, Strong, Solid, Below bar) and comments. Save draft keeps the status manager-reviewed; Finalise sets finalised and needs both ratings.
4. HR follows every form in Appraisals, filtered by cycle and status, with the self, manager and final ratings.

#4. Peer feedback

1. Employees open My feedback, choose a colleague, a tag (kudos, concern, development or peer-review) and write specific feedback. Tick Send anonymously to hide the sender.
2. HR reads the stream in Feedback. For anonymous feedback the sender is never returned by the API, not even to the subject.

#5. Feedback abuse audit

Feedback abuse audit is for administrators. It looks back over a window of 1 to 90 days (7 by default) and shows pair hotspots (one sender to one subject) and sender fan-out (one sender to many people). For anonymous feedback the thresholds are 5 or more to one person, or 5 or more distinct people; for named feedback 15 or more to one person or 20 or more distinct people. Use it to catch patterns the per-person rate limit cannot see.

#One-to-ones

The module also stores one-to-one meetings (employee, manager, meeting time, agenda, notes and follow-ups) through its API. The ERP has no one-to-one screen in the version reviewed.