What to expect: I'm a review admin

It's time for your team to participate in a Best-Self Review cycle! This article walks through what a review cycle looks like for you- a review admin- from start to finish. Check out the additional resources in each section for walk-throughs and context.

This article includes...

• Before the cycle begins: set the stage
• During the review cycle- it's show time!
• The results are in...
• After the review cycle

Check out these additional resources ⬇️

Help Center article 💡: What to expect: I'm a review participant
Help Center article 💡: What to expect: I'm a review manager
Help Center article 💡: F.A.Q. Best-Self Review™ and 360 reviews

Before the cycle begins: set the stage

Before you create a review cycle there's some behind-the-scenes work you, a review admin, are responsible for.

Best-self kickoff & Career Hub

Featured article (linked above): Career Hub 101
Featured article (linked above): Hold a Best-Self Kickoff meeting

Appoint administrative roles for your review cycle

Various administrative roles exist for Best-Self Review® cycles, and it's important to make sure the right people are appointed to those roles to ensure a successful and easeful review experience. 

Notable administrative roles include...

Review administrators: Can manage company settings for review cycles, create review cycles and question templates, manage active review cycles, delete review cycles, and, importantly, view all submitted reviews. Review admins can also manage peers for participants and share/finalize review results with participants.

Cycle collaborators: Have the same permissions as review admins (with the exception of creating or deleting review cycles), but only for the cycle(s) that they are added as a collaborator for.

Custom roles: 15Five gives you the ability to create custom administrative roles that give individuals only the permissions they need. Maybe you’re holding a review cycle with every department in your company, but you want to grant someone visibility into only one group’s review results. Or perhaps you don’t want someone to have full review admin visibility into review cycles, but you want them to be able to manage review settings and cycle participants. Whatever your use case, custom roles can help you tailor review permissions in a way that works for your organization. Custom roles can be assigned at any point during a review cycle.

Featured Help Center article (linked above) 💡: Roles in a Best-Self Review®
Help Center article 💡: Manage review administrators
Help Center article 💡: Create custom Best-Self Review® roles

Manage review settings

Your company's global review settings dictate default settings for all review cycles you create. Check out our "Manage company review settings" Help Center article for steps on how to manage review settings, as well as context regarding what each settings entails.

Featured Help Center article (linked above) 💡: Manage company review settings
Video 🎥: Configure global Best-Self Review® settings (4 min)

Manage review-specific email notifications

Doing reviews at a company can feel like directing an orchestra—there are a lot of moving parts and people to manage. To take the burden off of review admins, we automatically inform review participants of important milestones, remind them when something is due, and send emails that are action-based (meaning when someone takes an action, the email is triggered). While most of our emails are automated, we do allow review admins to manage some review emails from the company notifications page. Additionally, here's a full list of email notifications that may be sent out during a review cycle.

Featured Help Center article (linked above) 💡: Email notifications for a review cycle

Create answer templates (optional)

An answer template is a set of opinion-scale ratings that can be applied to opinion-scale questions in a question template. 15Five's default answer template is strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree. But if you prefer to use a different scale, you can create a custom answer template.

Answer templates can be reused and applied to any opinion-scale question in a review cycle.

Featured Help Center article (linked above)💡: Create an answer template

Create question templates

The next step towards launching a review cycle is to create question templates for your cycle.

Each review type - self/manager, peer, and upward - needs it's own question template, meaning that there can be up to three different templates in any given review cycle. You can either use our default 15Five question templates or you can create custom templates with your own questions. If you are using the default 15Five question templates, you can proceed to the next step in this article as you don't need to create a question template- you will simply select the default templates when creating your cycle.

Check out this article for steps on how to create a question template, as well as some example questions to use in your Best-Self Review® cycle!

Featured Help Center article (linked above)💡: Create, edit, and manage question templates
Video 🎥: Create a Best-Self Review® Question Template (5 min)
Help Center article💡: Default question templates for Best-Self Review®

Create a Performance Ratings+ template, formula, and rubric

Performance Ratings+ enables a holistic measure of performance, based on aggregate scores from self and/or manager review answers. Start making performance decisions at scale without the endless hours manipulating spreadsheets...all while reducing bias!

Performance Ratings templates are applied to question templates. Check out the "Performance Ratings+" section of our Help Center for details about the what and the how of Performance Ratings+.

Create the review cycle

Your company review settings are in order and you've created the question templates you're going to use for your upcoming review cycle- great success! Now it's time to create your review cycle by following the steps in our "Create a Best-Self Review® cycle" Help Center article.

Featured Help Center article (linked above) 💡: Create a Best-Self Review® cycle
Video 🎥: Configure a Best-Self Review cycle (10 min)

During the review cycle- it's show time!

You launched your review cycle- now what? This section walks through scenarios and logistics that may prove helpful as your team completes the review cycle.

Add or remove a participant

We understand that changes happen. If you find yourself in a situation in which you need to either add or remove participants to/from an active review cycle, you can do so by following the steps in our "Add or remove a review cycle participant" Help Center article.

Featured Help Center article (linked above) 💡: Add or remove a review cycle participant

Manage who is responsible for writing reviews about a person, or edit participant settings

At any point during a review cycle you can change who is responsible for writing reviews for a participant, or add a read-only review viewer (previously called "additional manager") for an individual (so someone other than a person's manager can see their review results). Check out the "Manage review cycle participants and settings" section of our Help Center for articles that walk through how to manage participant settings during an active review cycle.

Nominate peers for a participant

This is only relevant if peer reviews are included in a review cycle. While the review cycle participants themselves and their managers typically nominate peers for a participant, review admins and cycle collaborators also have the ability to do so.

Either participant-initiated or peer-initiated peer reviews can be included in a review cycle. In participant-initiated peer reviews (the default peer review cycle), either the review cycle participant themselves, their manager, a review admin (you), or a cycle collaborator can nominate peers for the participant. The manager, a review admin (you), or a cycle collaborator can approve, decline, or remove peer nominations for a participant. In peer-initiated peer reviews, peers volunteer to write peer reviews of participants; there is no nomination or approval process.

Help Center article 💡: Manage peer nominations for a review cycle participant
Help Center article 💡: Peer reviews: participant initiated vs peer initiated (linked above)

Send review reminders (we call them "nudges")

If you want to remind your team and gently nudge them to complete a review, you have the ability to "nudge" them, and 15Five will send them an email notification.

Help Center article 💡: Send nudges during an active cycle

Report on a cycle's progress

At any time during a review cycle, a review admin can run a progress report. The report includes all participants, a participant’s peers, a participant’s direct reports, submission dates, a participant’s answers, and multiple other fields.

Help Center article 💡: Download review cycle progress

Or, check out what additional reports are available in the "Check review cycle progress" section of our Help Center.

Create calibration sessions

15Five's Calibrations feature helps HR leaders and managers make more fair, objective, and transparent assessments of performance and talent decisions with ease. In calibration sessions, calibrators can see the distribution of review ratings across team managers and adjust those ratings in real-time. If you're planning to include calibrations in your review cycle, it's best to create the sessions and assign contributors prior to all results being in— so that contributors have more time between the manager due-by date and the calibrations window to spend actually holding the calibration sessions.

Check out the "Create a calibration session" section of our Help Center for more information.

The results are in...

When do reviews become visible?

Visibility is always a sensitive subject, especially when it comes to reviews. What reviews are visible? To whom? At what time do they become visible? These are all valid questions that vary from review to review. Check out our "When do reviews become visible to others?" Help Center article for all of your visibility questions.

Featured Help Center article (linked above)💡: When do reviews become visible to others?

Hold and lock calibration sessions

15Five's Calibrations helps HR leaders and managers make more fair, objective, and transparent assessments of performance and talent decisions with ease. Calibrations in 15Five make it easy for calibrators to see the distribution of review ratings across team managers and adjust those ratings in real-time.

Check out the "Hold a calibration session" section of our Help Center for more information about calibration sessions and how to hold a calibration session. Once you've held the calibration session, you should lock the session.

Share and finalize review results with participants

Once a participant's manager completes their review summary, they will schedule a final meeting with them to discuss review results, share review results with them, hold the meeting, make any desired edits to the summary, then finalize review results. This process is typically handled by managers, but review admins and cycle collaborators also have the ability to share and finalize review results.

Help Center article 💡: Complete, share, & finalize summaries

Unshare/reopen review results

Once review results have been shared with a participant, edits to previously submitted reviews can no longer be made. However, if edits do need to be made, as a review administrator, you have the ability to unshare/reopen their review results, so that the necessary individual can edit their review, and then re-submit the updated review. Cycle collaborators also have the ability to do this for any participant in the review cycle, and managers are able to to do this for their direct reports in the cycle.

Help Center article 💡: Undo shared and finalized reviews

Report on review results

Holding a review cycle is only part of the equation...now it's time to report on results and use them to guide conversations and promote organizational change. Check out the "Report on review results" section of our Help Center for a list of all reports you can run in a review cycle.

After the cycle

Lock a review cycle

Locking a review cycle means that users will no longer be able to submit reviews or edit any details within the cycle. This should only be done when the review cycle is fully completed and all summary meetings have been held.

Featured Help Center article (linked above)💡: Lock or unlock a review cycle

Download or print review details (for specific employees)

If you would like to view and analyze review data for specific employees, you can download or print the results from within their specific review page after the results have been shared and finalized. Check out our "Download my company's review results" Help Center article for instructions on how to do so.