15Five's Performance Ratings+ (PR+) tool allows you to combine scores from self and manager reviews to automate numerical ratings for review cycle participants. The data you get from PR+ can also be used to populate the performance metric on your HR Outcomes Dashboard, enabling you to report on top performers and bottom performers.
In this article, you will learn...
- Resources for Performance Ratings+
- What is Performance Ratings+?
- Benefits
- How it works
- Best practices for Performance Ratings+
- Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Access and availability
⛔️ Required access to Best-Self Review®.
👥 This article is relevant to Review Admins.
📦 This feature is available in the Perform and Total Platform pricing packages.
Resources for Performance Ratings+
- One-pager 🗒️: How to strategically leverage Performance Ratings+
- Role-based guide 🗒️: What to expect: I’m a review admin
- Help Center article 💡: Manage Performance Ratings+ settings
- Help Center article 💡: Create and manage performance ratings formulas
- Help Center article 💡: Create and manage performance rating rubrics
- Help Center article 💡: Report on performance ratings in a review cycle
- Webinar 🎥: Best-Self Review® for Admins (including Performance Ratings+)
What is Performance Ratings+?
15Five's Performance Ratings+ tool offers a true aggregate measure of employee performance and intuitive reporting that makes it easy to make performance-related decisions in your organization, bringing your team one step closer to fully integrating performance and compensation.
With PR+, HR leaders are empowered to holistically measure employee performance and use the insights gained to make informed decisions at scale. This tool is not just about assessing performance, but also about targeting retention efforts, driving growth, and maximizing performance across your organization.
Benefits
- Customization: Easily create a holistic measure of performance based on individual data inputs that are weighted differently.
- Quick talent decisions: Intuitive, insightful reporting on performance to help make compensation and performance-related decisions at scale.
- Connect pay and performance: Use Performance Ratings+ alongside 15Five Compensation to make informed compensation decisions that reward strong performance and retain top talent.
- Less work: Automated processes save HR admins time and resources without having to manually upload spreadsheets.
- Less time: Weighted calculations can be made, edited, and reviewed all inside 15Five.
- Less error: Increase confidence in the objective data being used to make important performance and compensation decisions.
How it works
Create or edit existing question templates to determine what values, competencies, or assessments of performance will be measured. From there, attain the level of specificity that is ideal for your organization by determining which questions to include for every section in the review.
Determine the explicit value of self or manager review questions and assign the level of impact each section has on performance using our intuitive weighing scale. Our convenient design helps decrease administrative load with automated calculations that remove the need for additional templates, downloads, or uploads.
Help Center article 💡: Create and manage performance ratings formulas
Establish a standardized process of performance using rubrics that establish a system of performance-level designations so that employees and managers have clear expectations and guidelines of what each rating means. PR+ combines the selected templates, ratings, and weighted values to provide HR leaders, managers, and admins with an objective view of performance.
Combine our Talent Matrix, Compare Groups, Performance Ratings, and Trends over Time reporting tools to unlock a 360° view of performance across the organization. Sort and discover ratings results by department level all the way down to individual employees, and use these insights to highlight key questions that signal success.
Use Performance Ratings to configure the Performance metric on your HR Outcomes Dashboard— allowing you to see how performance trends over time and compares to engagement, retention, and manager effectiveness.
Best practices for Performance Ratings+
Here are some important things to consider when you’re defining your approach to performance ratings:
- Clarity and Transparency: Ensure the performance rating system is clear and understandable for all employees. Transparent criteria and processes reduce ambiguity and foster trust in the valuation system.
- Creating Resources: Provide resources for company managers on how scores are calculated and what performance aspects they cover. Trust us— you’ll need your managers to buy into this system, so make sure you get their feedback early and share the “why’s” often! At 15Five, we assign managers a training through our Learning Management System before each review cycle that walks them through our Performance Ratings philosophy, formula, and rubric.
- Incorporating Behaviors and Results: We believe that performance should be a combination of behavioral aspects (like growth and development and company values) and the results of the employee’s work (like OKR attainment). Making an impact and the way they show up for work are both crucial.
- Considering the Full Picture: Avoid focusing solely on “outputs”. You should include questions around things like teamwork and company value alignment to avoid promoting high-performing individuals who may negatively impact your work environment. Put simply, no one wants to work with a brilliant jerk!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Performance ratings are calculated using the formula below:
When normalizing the opinion scales, we calculate them using the following formula:
For example, let's say that you created a Performance Ratings formula in which manager reviews were weighted at 100%. The manager rated an employee all 3s, and questions were rated on a 4-point scale. The employee's performance rating would be 66%.
Note
We use "1" as the minimum value because, otherwise, all of the normalized scores would be skewed more positively. This means that if a person is rated 1 on all included questions, their performance rating would be 0%.
Yes, but only until the first review in the cycle is submitted. To edit which performance ratings formula and/or rubric are used in a cycle, first create the new formula and/or create the new rubric, then follow the steps in our "Edit review settings for an active cycle" Help Center article.
No— it’s not possible to adjust performance ratings. Reason being, a person’s performance rating is auto-calculated based on the weights that were set in the performance ratings formula, and giving the option to adjust performance ratings defeats the purpose of setting up weighted ratings in the first place. All that said, if you want to have the ability to allow managers to have more of a say in their direct reports’ performance ratings, the best way to do so is to ask a Private Manager Assessment question about overall performance and include the answer to that question in your performance ratings formula.
As soon as reviews are submitted. Scores will be recalculated again when any edits are made to the review (including during calibrations when calibration sessions are locked).
Check out our "Analyze review results: Performance Ratings+ reporting" article for information about how to report on performance ratings and what reports are available for download.
Go to Company Results > Summary > Performance Ratings+ > View score distribution > Trends over time.
Note: It is not possible to implement ratings in historical cycles, so trends over time data will not be usable right away.