Roles in a performance review cycle

This article defines every role in a performance review cycle and describes what each role can do.

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

Required access: Performance Reviews (Perform and Total Platform packages). Relevant to all roles.

Feature Structure

A performance review cycle includes three categories of roles: administrative roles that manage the cycle, participant and reviewer roles that write and receive reviews, and special access roles that provide targeted visibility.

Administrative roles

Review admin

Review admins can create, edit, and delete review cycles; create and edit question templates; report on cycle progress; nominate and manage peers for participants; view all submitted reviews and results; interact with calibration sessions; share and finalize results; and lock or unlock review cycles. Review admins do not have to be participants to view progress and results.

Cycle collaborator

Cycle collaborators are added to a specific review cycle by a review admin — either during cycle creation or after launch — to help manage that cycle and its results. Cycle collaborators have the same permissions as review admins, except they cannot create review cycles, manage question templates, or delete review cycles. These permissions apply only to the cycles they are added to.

Participant and reviewer roles

Participant

A participant is the person being reviewed in a review cycle. Reviews are written about participants. Participants are determined during cycle creation. Participants are responsible for writing a self-review, nominating peers, and attending a final meeting with their manager.

Review writer

A review writer is any person responsible for writing a review about a participant. Review writers do not have to be participants themselves. Anyone writing a self, manager, additional manager, peer, or upward review is a review writer.

Peer

A peer is a person responsible for writing a peer review about a participant. Peers may or may not be participants in the cycle.

Related: Complete a peer review

Upward review writer

Upward review writers are people responsible for writing an upward review about their manager, where the manager is a participant in the cycle. A participant's direct reports are assigned as their upward reviewers by default. Review admins can edit upward reviewers for any participant.

Manager

Managers are responsible for writing manager reviews about their direct reports who are participants in the cycle. Managers also approve or deny peer nominations for their direct reports, share and finalize results, and hold a final review meeting. A participant's direct manager is assigned as their manager reviewer by default, but review admins can change this.

Additional manager

Additional managers are people other than a participant's direct manager who can write a manager review about that participant. One default additional manager and up to five cycle-specific additional managers can be appointed per participant. Additional manager feedback is included in calibration sessions and can be included in performance ratings formulas.

Special access roles

Review viewer

Review viewers are non-managers with read-only access to a participant's review results. This role supports change management, dotted-line, and matrix reporting scenarios. A person can be appointed as a cycle-specific review viewer (visibility into one cycle's results) or a global review viewer (visibility into all review results for a person).

Sharing user

Sharing users can share and finalize review results with a participant. This permission is in addition to the participant's manager, review admins, and cycle collaborators. A sharing user is added in the Who can share and finalize the reviews of [Participant]? section of an individual's review settings.

Calibration session contributor

Calibration session contributors (also called contributors) are assigned to specific calibration sessions. Contributors can make changes to managers' review ratings during a calibration session. Anyone can be appointed as a contributor.

HR Business Partner (HRBP)

The HRBP role allows HR Admins to grant HR Business Partners limited access to performance reviews for specific departments, groups, or reporting hierarchies — without giving them full HR Admin visibility. HRBPs can view and manage review cycles for their assigned population, monitor progress, access review data, and support calibrations within their scope.

Key Rules

Review admins have visibility into all cycles created while they held the role. If a review admin is added after a cycle begins or ends, an option appears to allow or restrict visibility into those previous cycles.
Cycle collaborator permissions apply only to the specific cycles they are added to.
One default additional manager and up to five cycle-specific additional managers can be appointed per participant.
Default additional managers can be granted visibility into all past reviews of the person they support, configured in feature settings.
Managers can remove feedback from peer or upward reviews only if a review admin enables that setting.