Building Performance Templates

A template is the review's blueprint — questions, scoring, approval stages, and commenters. Build it once, schedule it every cycle.

The five steps

The template builder (Settings → Performance Templates → Create Template) walks five tabs:

1. Information

Title, description, and the Active? toggle — inactive templates can't be picked when scheduling new reviews, which is how you retire old formats without breaking history.

2. Questions

Questions live inside drag-reorderable sections ("Core Competencies", "Goals", "Leadership"). Each question has a type, a required flag, optional points, and — crucially — an answered-by setting: reviewee only, reviewer only, or both. The question types:

Scored questions can be weighted separately for the reviewee and reviewer sides, so the manager's rating can count for more (or less) than the self-rating in the final score.

3. Feedback

Optional open-ended prompts ("What went well this year?") that the employee answers after their assessment. Feedback answers get automatic sentiment analysis, and the review stores an AI-generated summary of the cycle's feedback overall — useful signal across a whole department's worth of reviews.

4. Workflows

The approval chain, up to five stages. Each stage is a type — Initiator, Direct Manager, Department Manager, or named users — and stages run strictly in order: stage 2 reviewers aren't notified until stage 1 submits. One stage (direct manager) is the common case; add stages only when a second sign-off genuinely adds something.

5. Overall Commenters

Named people who may add high-level comments to completed reviews across the cycle — typically a leadership or HR committee. They see a review only once a track is complete.