Writing a Performance Review
Whether you’re having a monthly check-in, quarterly update, or semi-annual performance review, you can create a report to summarize and comment on a team member’s performance.
Team member can create reports for themselves while manager and administrators can create reports for their team members.
Building a Review
Here's a quick video on how to create a report:
Steps for creating a report:
- Navigate to the appropriate team member's dashboard, click on the Reports tab and click Create Report.
- Title your report and select the appropriate filter options, specifically electing to include or not include performance scores based on your team's default settings
- Pick from WorkStory AI or Traditional - here's a link to our "One-Click" WorkStory AI report walkthrough
- Follow the steps, reading through the feedback and progress updates while adding notes to each section
- Add a Summary note to finish up the evaluation, using any templates already created for your team
- (Optional) Share the report with others to have them review and add their own notes
- (Optional) Download the report to save and share the final document
- After all team members have added their notes, you can change the status of the report to "Finished"
Please note that exporting a report provides you with a PDF version of the information team members have written. It does not include any sensitive historic feedback comments.
Using AI When Writing a Review
We've integrated AI to allow team members to write their performance review notes in less time while also improving the overall quality of the feedback.
Team members can use this feature when writing individual notes.
We also offer a WorkStory AI method to creating the performance review which writes the entire review for you, in seconds. What once took a manager days they can now get done in just a few minutes.
The AI-generated content is free for you to use, edit, or delete once it is written. This is designed to make performance review writing a much quicker activity so that managers can focus more on team member development.
Sharing a Review
When a report is created, you can share it with the employee or other team members for them to review and provide their own notes. It's important to note that when sharing, some employees will have varying visibility of the report depending on their system permissions and relationship with the employee.
Sharing a report will create a task for that user to review the performance review. Performance review tasks will remain until the review is finalized or deleted.
You can share or un-share reports as necessary:
Receiving a Review
When a user is shared on a report they will see a message notifying them off access and linking them to the report builder. Unless the report is unshared, that team member can view the report.
Report recipients or those with general access (managers and administrators) can then view the report and provide their own commentary.
Exporting a Review
When you're done editing and adding notes to a report, you'll have a couple of options regarding the export.
- Standard download - typically used for 1:1 performance review conversations. This export includes the overall ratings and notes provided, it does not include all of the historic reviews
- Expanded download - this version of the export report is typically used for record keeping and is not employee facing. It is a large document that includes all historic review data as well as the ratings and notes provided during the review writing process.
The output will be a multi-page PDF formatted in a print-friendly document:
Finalizing a Review
When a performance review is complete, the author of the report or the team member's manager can finalize the review by changing its status to "Finished". This closes out the final report and removes and tasks associated with it.
You can finalize a report from the final step (6) of the report builder:
Deleting a Review
Reports can be deleted by the author of the report or the team member's manager. Administrators also have access to viewing and deleting reports as needed for the entire team.
You can delete a report from the final step (6) of the report builder:
