Create a calibration session

Calibrations in 15Five allow contributors to see the distribution of private manager assessment ratings across team managers and adjust those ratings in real time, ensuring a more fair and equitable review cycle.

Once a review cycle is created, review admins can start creating calibration sessions— that is, creating the framework to hold calibration sessions once manager reviews are submitted. If you've already outlined who the contributors are and whose results will be calibrated in a session ahead of time, there will be more time to actually hold the sessions during the calibrations window (the time between the 'Manager reviews due by' date and the 'Calibrations due by' date).

In this article, you will learn...

How to prepare for creating calibration sessions
How to create a calibration session
How to clone or edit a calibration session
Next steps
Additional resources

Access and availability

⛔️ Required access to Best-Self Review® and Calibrations.
👥 This article is relevant to Review admins and Cycle collaborators.
📦 This feature is available in the Perform and Total Platform pricing packages.

Are you more of a visual learner? Check out this video ⬇️

Prepare to create calibration sessions

Before you create calibration sessions, there are some important things to consider:

How do you want to organize the sessions?
There isn't a limit to how many calibration sessions you can create, so you must decide how you want to organize the sessions: by department? By manager? By role or level? Or company-wide? Who is included and how many sessions you want to have is totally up to you. Just keep in mind that the more sessions you create, the more time you'll need.
Who should the contributors for the session be?
Contributors are the people who are responsible for holding a calibration session— that is, discussing results and making changes as needed. Contributors are usually managers, skip level managers, senior peers, leadership, and/or HR. We suggest that you aim to have the same or similar ratio of roles in each session, and that you appoint a moderator (People Ops/HR) to ensure everyone in the session has equal opportunity to share their insight.
In addition to viewing manager review results included in the calibration session, contributors can change answers, tag other people who can view the calibration session, and comment on calibration sessions. Anyone can be a contributor, and there is no limit to the number of contributors that can be appointed in a session. Review admins and cycle collaborators are not added as contributors by default, and must be appointed as such if you want them to have the ability to edit answers in a calibration session.
Who can see calibration sessions?
Contributors for a specific calibration session can see into that calibration session only. Review administrators have visibility into all calibration sessions. Contributors can view calibration sessions that they are contributors for, including all private manager assessment answers for the participants included in the session. Contributor's own information will be excluded from any session they're a contributor in—the exception being that they will have visibility into their own Private Manager Assessment answers if visibility into the Private Manager Assessment was granted to participants when the review admin created the review cycle.

Once you know who should be included and who the contributors should be, you can create the sessions.

Click on Best-Self Review® in 15Five's man, left-hand navigation.
Click on the name of the review cycle you want to create a calibration session in.
Open the 'Calibrations' tab from the top navigation bar.
Click Create calibration session.
Session name. Name the session. Choose a name that will make it easy for you to remember who was included in the session. For example, "Design ICs for Q2 2022".
Include review sections. Select which review sections you want to include in the calibration session. By default, only Private manager assessment answers are included in the session, but you have the option to include answers given to 'Company values', 'Team competencies', and 'Objectives' sections.
Invite contributors. Select the contributors for the session. These are the people who will work together to calibrate review results for all review cycle participants included in the calibration session. You must select at least one contributor, but we recommend try 3-5 contributors (depending on the number of people whose results you are calibrating).
Whose review data would you like to include in this session? Choose which participant's results will be calibrated in the session.
Exclude individuals from this calibration session. Select which participants or groups you want to exclude from the calibration session. If you selected a group(s) in the previous step, you will also see the option to exclude specific group members.
Click Create session.

Clone or edit a calibration session

Click on Best-Self Review® in 15Five's man, left-hand navigation.
Click on the name of the review cycle you want to create a calibration session in.
Open the 'Calibrations' tab from the top navigation bar.
Click '...' to the right of the calibration session you want to clone, then select 'Clone calibration session' from the dropdown menu.
If you select 'Clone calibration session', the "Create calibration session" wizard will open, with information auto-populated based on the settings of the session you cloned. Make any desired changes, then click Create session.
If you select 'Edit calibration session', you will see the option to edit the following fields: session name, which review sections are included in the session, contributors, and participants. Session contributors, review sections, and participants review data can only be edited before an answer has been calibrated. If you need to make changes to these settings once you've already calibrated an answer, please delete this session and create a new one.

What happens next?

As manager reviews are submitted, calibration sessions will populate with answers to whatever review sections were included in the calibration session (Private manager assessment, Company values, Competencies, and/or Objectives).
Managers can edit their private manager assessment answers until the 'Manager reviews due by' date, which managers can see in the 'Review details' box that appears on the left-hand side of any manager review.
It is important that managers submit their manager reviews before the due-by date so that calibrations stay on track. Once the 'Manager reviews due by' date has passed, managers will no longer be able to edit any private manager assessment answers and calibration sessions can begin. Check out our "Hold a calibration session" Help Center article for next steps.

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