Calibrations in performance reviews — overview

A calibration session is the structured workspace where Review admins, Cycle collaborators, and Contributors review manager ratings, discuss discrepancies, and adjust answers to ensure consistent participant evaluations. Calibration sessions become accessible after the Manager reviews due by milestone has passed.

Note: Your organization may have renamed the Best-Self Review® feature. If you don't see this feature in your navigation, check with your admin for the name used in your account.

Feature Structure

A calibration session contains four functional areas:

Filters — Narrow the participants displayed in the session.

  • People & Groups: Filter by reporting hierarchy, group, or individual.
  • Attribute-based: Filter by department, location, job level, salary band, or any custom people attribute. HR admins can view demographic attributes (e.g., gender, ethnicity, age). Contributors can view custom attributes (e.g., department, location).

Talent Matrix — A 9-box grid that visualizes manager ratings across two questions. Participants can be moved between boxes by dragging and dropping to change their received answer. Clicking a participant's avatar shows text responses from their manager(s). Clicking a participant's name opens a details drawer with custom attributes, past review results, and a link to their full review.

Calibration Table — A row-by-row view of ratings for all session participants. Contributors can edit review answers, manage visible columns, view AI Review Summaries, flag participants, remove participants, and view written responses. Changes display in yellow with the original answer crossed out and the calibrated answer shown. All changes sync in real time and appear in the Activity Feed.

Activity Feed — A log of all changes made during the session. Contributors, Review admins, and Cycle collaborators can add comments, start reply threads, and @mention other session members to document why changes were made.

What You Can Do

Set Up

Run a Session

Analyze and Export

Common Questions

Key Rules

  • Calibration sessions are inaccessible until the Manager reviews due by milestone has passed.
  • Changes to review answers in the Calibration Table or Talent Matrix save automatically in real time.
  • Changing any manager review answer applies the change to all manager reviews for that participant — including additional manager reviews.
  • If a participant is included in more than one calibration session, changes to their answers sync immediately across all sessions.
  • Performance Ratings cannot be changed directly. Ratings update automatically when answer changes affect the rating formula.
  • Participants never see calibration details. Only managers can see original versus updated ratings, visible in review summaries after the session is locked.
  • To identify which calibration sessions an employee is a part of, download the Full progress report and refer to the Calibration session status column.
  • Calibrated answers appear in review summaries only after the session is locked.

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