The Employee Performance report can only pull standard data. When you export that report, however, the custom questions are included. The reason for this is that we code the system to interpret those 4 standard questions, but the system doesn't know how to graph/interpret custom questions.

We don't recommend doing a full reset on your Performance feature as it will remove everything you have done so far, and it will be as if you had never activated the feature. This includes any goals, feedback requested or received, and any assessments completed (both current and past).

If you have only used the feature for testing and want to do a reset so you can now move forward with using it for your company, please contact support with the request.

Our recommended best practice is to enable Performance Management as soon as you add it to your account, even if you dont plan on completing your first assessment for several more months. Your employees will be able to start using the Goals feature right away and since Peer Feedback happens quarterly, you may also be able to have a round or two of Peer Feedback before your first Assessment.

Both of these are a huge advantages because managers can use information gathered from Goals and Peer Feedback when completing their manager assessments. It also serves as a soft roll-out to your employees so they are already familiar with Performance Management in BambooHR by the time the first Assessment rolls around.

Even if you aren't ready to have your first assessment quite yet, we highly recommend you enable Performance now so that you can start gathering data and get your employees engaged with the system.

BambooHR® Performance Management includes all of these features, but you do not have to use each (determined in Settings > Performance). However, we strongly recommend using all three features as each brings unique value to a performance review cycle. Performance Management is simple, accurate, and it motivates employees and managers to take action. When incorporating all features, everyone with access to Performance gets a better understanding of how, when, and where to take action.

Based on what we have seen with customizations around performance management, it does not typically provide a good user experience in BambooHR. Also, the customizations provide no added functionality to our current performance management feature. (Historically, our customers have not used performance customizations after we have added them.)

Yes, Managers can always see the Performance tab of their direct and indirect reports, regardless of their access level settings, but you can do this more easily by having the manager access level settings include direct and indirect reports.

• If set to Direct and Indirect Reports, the manager can go to indirect report's employee profile to see all the information they have access to view, including performance data. On the indirect report's Performance tab, the manager can add and change goals as well. Managers cannot submit assessments on the indirect report, but a direct manager can ask them to provide feedback.
• If set to Direct Reports, managers can still go to their direct reports' employee profiles. If they click on a indirect report in their reporting line, they will only be able to view the Performance tab and no other tabs.

If you do not enable Performance Management for the CEO (and thereby the company is not paying for them), they can still prompt a manager assessment for their direct reports. The CEO will not have their reviews completed because the feature is not available for them, but they can still administer them and see others' performance information.

Currently, goals and assessments are available in the BambooHR mobile app.

Yes. Canceling Performance Management will remove the entire feature, including its data, reports, etc. from your account.

Yes. Managers with direct and indirect reports have automatic access to complete tasks associated with performance management. Click here to learn more about other access options in Performance Management.

Yes—as long as you give them access through a custom access level.

No. There is no limit on the number of review cycles you can create in BambooHR.

No. Currently, there are no reports that show this specific information.

When they navigate to their Performance tab and click Assessment ,they will notice the names of all active review cycles attached to a specific date range in the dropdown menu.

The Start Assessment option will show up on an employee’s PerformanceAssessments tab if you skip all active assessments for every active review cycle an employee is in.

Yes! You can use the By Hire Date option when setting up your review cycle. The best way to do this is to schedule managers and employees to complete their assessments either two or three months after the hire date and keep the Repeat box without a checkmark.

Even if reviews are not due until the end of the year, it can be easy to forget. Setting the date now will help you move on to other tasks. It will also help you get feedback and goals started as soon as possible to have more information for managers to use in the assessments.

Yes! You can create review cycles on a fixed date (all employees will have reviews start on the same date) or the hire date (employees included will have reviews start based on the date they got hired).

The system is set up so that once the notifications go out and someone starts the assessment, the questions are locked for editing until the Review Cycle period ends. This helps ensure that the questions and answers match up and that your data and reports are correct.

Full Admins are sent an email notification 10 days before the start of the next assessment period that recommends they double-check their assessment questions. You can also set up multiple Performance Review Cycles to help you gather additional information.

The reasoning behind this is that if the system did allow for assessment questions to be changed mid Review Cycle, it would invalidate any completed responses from employees and/or managers and their reviews would not have the updated questions. Therefore, everyone would have to complete the assessment again.

Allowing edits to questions would also cause issues with exporting performance reports since the columns and questions would differ based on when the assessment was completed. To avoid these scenarios, there is no option to edit the assessment questions once they have been sent out.

The system automatically allows for the managers to continue working on their assessment reviews even after the due date. The due date is for when the email notifications will stop going out to remind the users to complete their assessments and to create the employment performance report with the results gathered so far.

Anyone who has not yet finished will still be able to complete after the due date as the feature is not disabled and is still functional after that date.

The time-out window is currently set to 30 minutes of inactivity for a full log-out. After 10 minutes, it will grey out the screen and require a password to log back in but will then take you to the same page you were on. These logout time frames are in line with security best practices. If an employee is logged out in the middle of an assessment, their progress should be automatically saved. However, if an employee needs to step away for a minute, we recommend they click the option to save and finish the review later.

In the situation where they may have stepped away and come back to find that the system has logged out, they can log back in and resume their assessment from where they left off.

The four questions shown for assessments are our standard, hard-coded questions that aren't editable. These questions are standard across all accounts using Performance. That being said, we do recognize that each company has different needs, so you now have the option to remove all four standard questions from your assessments if you would like. Additionally, we have also included the ability to add up to ten custom questions on top of, or instead of, the standard set.

A lot of research went into creating the Performance section, and the standard questions are questions that we have found help to make performance reviews more effective. BambooHR has also made these questions standard intentionally so that our reports can quantify your data in a consistent way, and you can see the trends across the company and compare different departments.

Performance Management is designed to provide access to only the direct manager of an employee. That means that if your assessment period has closed and passed the due date already, those assessments will be locked for only the current manager (assigned at the time assessments were due) to complete.

Any managers who were unable to complete their employee assessments during an assessment period are still able to complete them since the due date is a soft due date. They can access past-due assessments by going to the employee's profile and clicking Performance Tab > Assessment. You can then change the date box to the previous Review Period (or View Previous Assessment) and complete the assessment from there.

If you do need to change the employee's manager during your assessment period, you can edit the "Reports To" field in their Job Information table on the Job tab. As long as you do this before your assessment period closes, the new manager will be able to complete that employee's assessment.

Performance Management is designed to provide access to only the direct manager of an employee. Because of this, it is not possible to reassign the assessment to another person without changing the manager in the employee's Job Information table on the Job tab.

If you do need to change the employee's manager during your assessment period, you can edit the "Report's To" field in their Job Information table on the Job tab. As long as you do this before your assessment period closes, the new manager will be able to complete that employee's assessment.

It is possible for the manager to go to the employee's Performance tab and edit the notes for the Assessment that are at the top. Please note that the employee will always have access to view whatever is entered into this notes section.

When adding custom assessment questions, you can create questions specifically for the manager or the employee by leaving the other's question field blank. If one side is left blank, only one question for that round will be posted. Note that only the first two sensitive questions from the BambooHR standard questions on the manager side of the assessment will be hidden. Custom questions and ratings will be visible to both the employee and manager when viewing the assessment results.

There isn't a way to prevent someone who is included in Performance from receiving the employee self-assessment. Even if the CEO, for example, was not reporting to a manager, they would still have the self-assessment appear for them. This is something our Performance Management automatically creates for those that are included in the Performance Review Period.

Since we are not able to hide this feature, you can just Skip Assessments for any applicable employees by clicking on the Skip This Assessment at the top right of the Assessments section of their Performance tab.

Assessments start based on the New Window Start Date field configured in a review cycle setup (Settings > Performance > Review Cycles). We recommend beginning assessments at least one week in advance to ensure you have time to set up the review cycle, and the system will send out all email notifications on time when the assessment window starts.

There can be a total of fourteen questions with four standard questions and up to ten custom questions.

Extensive research has found that assessments are most helpful when they are simple. This simplicity allows the manager and employee to focus on the most important aspects of an employee's work. We understand that there are other thought-provoking questions out there, so we allow up to ten custom questions. You may not feel that this is enough based on previous performance reviews you have conducted, but we are challenging that. The performance reviews of BambooHR are different in that they focus on what is most important. If you truly need to store additional performance information, there is an option to upload scanned documents to the assessment.

Yes. However, we get honest with our default questions by embracing the idiosyncrasies and flaws in human judgment. We ask managers what they would do if their employee received a job offer elsewhere to discover how truly valuable the employee is to the company. The answers reflect the sentiment that may be uncomfortable when recognized. The following questions help managers to start or continue a crucial dialogue with their employees.

• Do the employees feel valued by their organization?
• What can help them perform more of their best work every day?
• How is their attitude and engagement?

These questions include what the employee does well and how they could improve. They are industry, company, role, location, tenure, and culture agnostic. They work for anyone because they are at the core of self-evaluation and continuous improvement. We feel that these questions are necessary for assessing performance in a way that focuses on the employee's needs.

In Performance Management, employees cannot submit an assessment of their manager. However, if you have the Elite package, employees can submit upward feedback on their manager. To learn more, navigate to the 360° Feedback help guide.

Requesting feedback directly from an employee's profile, or impromptu feedback, will ask the Standard Feedback Questions. This means that Custom questions are not included in this type of feedback request.

If you would like Custom questions included in feedback, it will need to be requested through a review cycle. As long as there is not a current feedback period in progress, you can go to your review cycle settings and adjust the date so feedback is triggered on the date selected. If you need to change the date back, you can always do that after the feedback cycle is complete.

The AI Summarized Feedback feature utilizes advanced AI technology to summarize peer and upward feedback automatically. It provides concise and actionable summaries, significantly reducing the manual work required for feedback analysis.

Under Settings > Performance, check the "Include Feedback Summaries" box to enable this feature on the Review Cycles tab.

Once enabled, an AI summary of the employee's feedback will show at the top of the Feedback section under the Performance tab. This AI feedback summary pulls in feedback every six months and requires a minimum of three feedback reviews from standard feedback questions.

The Date field under Feedback in a review cycle setup determines the feedback start dates. Based on your selected start date, you can then have feedback happen every 3, 4, 6, or 12 months.

Admins, the employee’s manager, and the manager’s manager can view feedback on a specific employee, but that specific employee (including admins) receiving the feedback will not be able to view it. Studies show that people provide more honest and open feedback if they know the recipient will not see it. However, strictly anonymous feedback lacks the context of the provider, which can be very helpful for managers in determining what actions to take with the information shared. The goal is to create an environment where individuals can share open feedback in an insightful and actionable way.

If you have the Pro package, managers will not be able to view upward feedback provided on themselves.

The employee can log in to their employee profile and go to their inbox. Within the inbox, they will be able to view the feedback they provided on other employees.

Once enabled, an AI summary of the employee's feedback will show at the top of the Feedback section under the Performance tab. This AI feedback summary pulls in feedback from the last six months and requires a minimum of three feedback reviews from at least two standard feedback questions for each employee.

An email notification is sent when a goal is commented on. These emails are sent once per day at 6 p.m. based on the company's timezone in General Settings, not immediately after the comment is added.

Goals are ordered by the due date, with the closest due dates on top. If there are multiple goals with the same due date, there is no way to reorder them. The system will place them in order with the first goal that was added on top, then the second, and so on.

No, there is no limit.

S.M.A.R.T goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound)

Not currently.

Click here to view the email notifications associated with goal tracking.

Yes, employees can share goals with other team members to help unify their efforts and complete goals faster. Additionally, managers can work with their employees to establish cascading goals that align with organizational objectives.

On an employee's Performance tab, click Goals. The Status dropdown menu allows you to select what kind of goals you want to view: In Progress, Completed, or Closed.

Yes.

Yes, but only if you have granted your employees access under Settings  > Performance > Goals.

We prioritize privacy and ensure transparency between managers and their direct reports by restricting visibility exclusively to them. Account Owners and Full Admins do not have access to Performance 1:1 information beyond their own direct reports, even when previewing as a manager.

Yes, there are five different email notifications included with 1:1s:

1. When a manager no longer has access to 1:1s for an employee (for a manager change, for example) the manager receives a notification with a secure email link for past 1:1 notes.
2. When a manager sets up 1:1s for the first time, the employee will receive a brief description of 1:1s and the schedule the manager chose.
3. Employees will receive an email on the day of their 1:1 with the agenda or stating that there is no agenda, with a suggestion to add agenda items.
4. Managers will receive the same 'day of' emails that an employee receives.
5. Managers will also receive a summary 1:1 email if they have multiple 1:1s on the same day. It will include all agenda items for all 1:1s that day.

Currently, custom reports are only available for Goals within Performance Management. We also offer standard reports with filters you can use to view a specific set of data. Our standard reports for Performance Management are Assessment Progress, Company Performance, Employee Performance, Feedback Status, and Goal Status.

No. The admin can view other employees' information but not their own information.

The Employee Performance report will be your best resource. It will show all assessments completed within a specified date range. Click on an employee's picture to see a trendline showing changes in their manager ratings over their last few assessments.

If a user shares the report with a manager, the manager will only see their direct indirect reports, never themselves.

Yes, but you will first need to export the report, and the exported file will show your employees' answers to the custom assessment questions.

You can still access the reports, but those assessments will not show up.

If you wish to view custom assessment questions and answers, navigate to the Employee Performance report, specify the date range, and download the report. This downloaded report will reflect custom questions and answers of all assessments from the review cycles included in the selected date range, regardless of whether or not the assessments used the BambooHR standard assessment questions.