As a manager in a review cycle that includes peer reviews, you are responsible for reviewing submitted peer reviews written about your direct reports. It's important to review peer reviews before sharing results and holding a final meeting with your direct report for several reasons: 1) you want to be informed for your final meeting, 2) you want to ensure that all review answers are appropriate and, if not, remove those answers, and 3) you want to prepare action items that you or your direct report should take based on feedback prior to meeting with them.
If you are a review viewer (formerly called an "additional manager") for a participant, you have read-only visibility into all reviews submitted about that participant. You can view review results, but don't have the ability to remove answers or write review summaries.
In this article, you will learn...
- What the peer review process looks like
- What visibility and permission options exist for peer reviews
- How to access and review peer reviews of your team
Peer review process overview
If you're the manager of review cycle participants in a review cycle that includes peer reviews, you are responsible for reviewing peer reviews submitted about them. This happens after the peer nomination process is completed and before sharing and finalizing results with your direct report.
Here's what the review process looks like:
- The peer nomination process is completed. Peers submit reviews of the review cycle participant.
- After submission/notification, you can open the peer review. Review admins, cycle collaborators, a participant's review viewers (previously called "additional managers"), and anyone in the participant's hierarchy* can also view peer reviews upon submission.
- If any answers on the peer review aren't constructive, you have the ability to either remove feedback or send feedback to review admins to remove it so it isn't shared with your direct report.
- Once the review summary opens, you can write summary notes, share review results with your direct report, and hold a final meeting with them to go over review results. Review admins and cycle collaborators can also share and finalize review results for a review cycle participant. Peer reviews are not visible to your direct report until you share the results. You will not be able to remove feedback from peer reviews once results have been shared, but can make edits to your summary until review results are finalized.
- Whether the peer's identity shared with the participant depends on review cycle settings. Whether the peer's verbatim feedback is shared with the participant depends on review cycle settings or whether a review answer was removed from shared results.
*This is only the case if hierarchy visibility is enabled for the review cycle
Check out these additional resources ⬇️
Help Center article 💡: Manage peer nominations for a review cycle participant
Help Center article 💡: Peer reviews: participant initiated vs peer initiated
Help Center article 💡: Review submitted peer reviews of my team
Help Center article 💡: Remove a review answer from a participant's view
Visibility and permission options for peer reviews
This section walks through options set in your company's Best-Self Review® feature settings that impact visibility and permissions for peer reviews. These settings can only be managed by account admins.
Remove feedback: Depending on your company review settings, either you (the manager) or a review admin have the ability to remove feedback that is not constructive on these peer reviews. If you do not have permission to remove feedback on your own, you can send a request to a review admin to remove it.
Peer review transparency
- Peer review visibility: There is also a setting that review admins can enable which hides all peer feedback from being shared verbatim with the participant. If this setting is enabled for the cycle, you will see a note at the top of the peer reviews letting you know that the participant (your direct report) will not see the peer answers verbatim and that you should include the peer feedback in your summary.
- Peer identity visibility: Depending on the review settings, the identity of the peer review author may be hidden from you and/or your direct report.
Access and review peer reviews for your team
- Click on Best-Self Review® in 15Five's main, left-hand navigation.
- Click on the name of the cycle you need to work on. It will be under the 'Active review cycles' section.
- If you are also a review admin or cycle collaborator in addition to your role as a manager, select the 'My team' option at the top of the review cycle's Overview page.
If you are a manager without additional review cycle permissions, the 'My team' option will be selected for you by default. - Scroll down to the 'Cycle participants' section and find the direct report you want to review peer reviews for. Click their name to open their review results, or click ... to the right of their name and select 'View' from the dropdown menu.
- Click into the 'Peer' tab to see all submitted peer reviews.
- If peer reviews are hidden from the participant, your direct report, you will see the yellow message shown below.
- If you have permission to remove feedback from peer reviews, you will see a ... to the right of each peer review answer. Select 'Remove from shared results' to remove the answer from your direct report's view, or select 'Allow editing' to reopen the peer review and send it back to the review author for editing. You can read more about this process in our "Remove a review answer from a participant's view" Help Center article.
- Review the submitted peer reviews and use this information to help you complete your review summary and guide your final meeting.