From this page the Performance Manager would be able to manage the end to end process of annual performance management. Refer to the article on "Components of PMS" for more background information.

Activities to be done during the Annual Performance Review by a Performance Manager are -
1. Creating / Editing a Performance Cycle
2. Map Templates and Assessors / Reviewers
3. Map Employees
4. Manage Performance Stages

Performance Cycle

A "Performance Cycle" is the overall process from goal setting to release of results which covers all the aspects of the performance review process. In this article you will understand all the aspects related to creating and managing a performance cycle.

1. Creating / Editing a Performance Cycle
A cycle is created by mapping a plan and is typically for a year though you can design a cycle which can less than a year also, the following actions are possible
- to create a new cycle click on "Initiate New Cycle" button
- to edit an cycle use the "Edit Cycle" button, what you can edit in the cycle will depend upon if the cycle has been released or not

Steps to be followed to create a new cycle. Click on "Initiate New Cycle" button. A form as shown below will open.

1. Give a cycle name
2. Select the Plan - plan has to be created in setup, refer article on "Creating Performance Plans" for more details
3. Select the period - if your review frequency is Monthly you can select the end month as any month in future and it need not be 12 months from begin month but if review frequency is Quarterly, Half yearly or Annual then the total period has to be of 12 months
4. Upload user guides - using this option you can upload user guides which will be visible to employees on the performance sheet. Different guides can be uploaded for different pages
5. Employee type to be included - you can select the categories of employees you would like to be included in the cycle, even if a category is included you can still exclude some employees from it subsequently
6. Selection of employees : You can either select all employees or use a selection criteria, if you use a selection criteria all employees meeting this logical condition at the time the cycle creation will be included in the cycle. However you can exclude some of the employees manually at the next step of template mapping. For example, as shown above all the employees mapped to Sales department will be included in the cycle. Employees who get transferred into sales department after cycle creation can also be included subsequently, for that refer to the next section in this article

Refer to the article on "Mapping new joiners to Performance Cycle" for details on how new joiners are mapped to existing performance cycles.

2. Mapping Templates and Assessor / Reviewers

Click on "Template Mapping" button on the cycle for which you want to map templates and assessor / reviewers.

The following activities can be done on this grid -
- Templates can be mapped to individual employees : mapped templates cannot be changed once the goals setting process is released for an employee
- Changing mapped Assessors and Reviewers : review and if needed change the Assessors and Reviewers mapped to certain employees, this can be done at any stage of the PMS process. By default system maps the Assessor and Reviewer based on the mapping done in setup
- Select "Exclude" checkbox if you want to exclude any employee from the process. Excluded employees cannot be included back in the cycle if the goal setting process is automated and the first cycle of goal setting has been released, however if manual goal setting process is in use then they can be included at a later stage
- You can use the "All" option on the top of the first column to select all records in the table
- Exclusion, template mapping, and Assessor and Reviewer mapping or modifications can be done by through the "Bulk Upload" process using an excel file

Employee cannot be made as the the Assessor / Reviewer of himself.

3. Managing Stages in a Cycle

You can control the various stages and release the process for updation to employees and assessors / reviewers through the year. Click on "Manage Cycle" button to open up the table which shows you a count of employees in various stages of the cycle.

- Whenever a stage is released all the employees who are at pending for release are shown as eligible employees
- When releasing a stage Performance Manager can decide the End date, Start date is always the current date
- All Employees, Assessors and Reviewers who are a part of the release will get an alert
- An entry is created in stage release history table

3.1 Release of Goals
This is the first step of the performance cycle and has to be done even if automated goal setting is being used. Only after this process is released manually once will the automated goal setting process will start working for subsequent new joiners.

The flow of process is fixed – the goals are first submitted by Employee and then reviewed / modified / approved by the Assessor. If you don’t want the goals to be set by the employee and the control should go directly to the Assessor you can do so by deselecting the Employee checkbox from the participant list as when you are releasing the goals. If you deselect the Assessor checkbox the goal sheet will not go to the Assessor for approval.

Activities to be done by Performance Manager are -
1. Click on "Release" button – a new section will open up where the names of employees who will be a part of the release is shown
2. You can do the following
- if you want to exclude any employees click on Exclude checkbox
- select the checkbox for Participants - Employee / Assessor
- enter the End Date for the goal setting process
- click on "Release Stage" button, this will release the process, send out an email and dashboard alert to the Employees and Assessors simultaneously
- If you want to fill the up goals centrally for all the employees or if the goals have already been filled in some other format you can click on "Skip the Process" button this will skip the Goal setting process and go straight to the first period review, see section 3.3 below for more details
5. As the Employees fill up their goals Performance Manager can see the status changing to “Goals-Submitted”
6. As the Assessor approves employee goals the list of pending employees will reduce and Performance Manager can see the status as “Goals-Approved”

Note - Any subsequent release of the stage will have the same participants as selected for the first release.

3.2 Reminder Alert
If the goal setting window is opening for 2 weeks and the Performance Manager observes after 1 week that less than 10% of goals are in Approved status then he can send alert to all the pending employees and Assessors. This can be done through the following steps –
1. Go to Stage Release history tab
2. Filter on Company / Stage if needed
3. Use the "Send Reminder Alert" button to send an alert to all employees and Assessors with whom the activities are pending. "Send reminder alert" button is visible only when end date is not gone in past

3.3 Skipping of Goal Setting
If the Performance Manager wants to update the goals centrally he can skip the release of goal setting, follow these steps to skip a stage -
1. On Performance Home page select the stage – Goals in this case – click on "Manage Stage" button
2. Click on "Release" button to see the release process
3. Click on "Skip the Process" button, system will move all the employees whose goals were pending to goals approved stage, no alert will be sent to anyone
4. If you review Stage Release History table an entry with from and to dates of one day earlier will be there

Note:
- Skipping of Goal setting will not work for Automated goal setting setup but will work for subsequent stages
- All stages except Annual review and Results release can be skipped
- Exclude button will not work during this and the process will be skipped for all employees in the list

3.4 Re-release of Goal Setting
When the goals are re-released the alert is sent to the employee or the Assessor depending upon with whom the process was pending.

3.5 Releasing One Performance Sheet

If you want to release one performance sheet to an employee, assessor or reviewer you can do so. Click on the "Release" button.

Provide the additional details as shown in the popup

1. Select the employees from the employee list by clicking on the checkbox in the first column
2. Download the template using the "Download Template" button
3. Fill up the template - instructions on filling up the template are given in the first tab, follow them and fill up the excel file and upload it back in the system using the "Upload" button

4. If any records are being rejected due to some error you can check the nature of error by downloading the rejected data. Click on "Submit" to upload the approved data.

There are some constraints on till when the criteria can be added / removed from the goal sheet or till when the weightage or the target against a criteria can be edited. The design allows you to add or remove a criteria or change the weightage or target for a criteria till the goal setting process has been done. Once the periodic review cycle has been released then the you can add / remove  or edit the weightage of a criteria only if the process is not scoring based.
You can use the bulk update process only for employees for which the control is with Performance Manager, if a goal setting or periodic review cycle has been released and the control is with the employees / assessors / reviewers then bulk update will not be allowed for those employees.

There are three groups of employees which are listed in different tables
a) Separated employees - this shows employees who have resigned, their sheets will not be released but can be updated by the Performance Manager manually
b) Pending employees - these are the employees whose stage is pending, it can be in pending with employee, assessor or reviewer
c) Completed employees - employees for which the stage has been completed

3.7 Release of Monthly / Quarterly / Half Yearly Review
Similar to releasing the Goal Setting process the Performance Manager can release the monthly / quarterly or half yearly review process. The image shown below shows release of Quarter 1 review.

An additional option is available in the release of monthly / quarterly / half yearly stages - "Update as Null". If some records are updated using this option the impact would be
- there would be no review at all for this stage for the selected employees
- if a stage is "Updated as null" then it would not be considered aggregate scores / ranks also. For example if in a quarterly cycle Q2 is updated as null for an employee then his scores / ranks would be considered for only the remaining three quarters Q1, Q3 and Annul. Annual stage cannot be updated as null
- This option should be used if an employee is on long leave or for any other reason you do not want a review to be done in a particular stage

Similar to skipping the goal setting the review stage can also be skipped. This will have the following impact on the process
- The status would be updated from Stage Pending to Stage Approved
- Scores or Ranks which are to be updated by Employee / Assessor / Reviewer will be empty and treated as null (they will not be used for calculation both in numerator and denominator)
- If the Performance Manager wants to edit and update the Score or Rank he can do so by editing the sheet or by using bulk upload

3.8Annual Review
Similar to the other parts of the process here also the process is released by the Performance Manager, self assessment is done by the employee and feedback is given by the Assessor / Reviewer.

3.9 Rating Finalization
After the annual review time-period is over and the feedback for all employees has been received from their Assessors / Reviewers then the Performance Manager can finalize and release the final rating of the employees. Steps to be taken for doing this process are -

1. Refer to the report – Employee Report > Rating Summary report is used to get a picture of recommended rating for all the employees
2. For the employees whose recommended rating is not filled up, Performance Managers can fill it up using the Edit button
3. Final rating of the employees can be filled by
a) using the Bulk Upload Rating button - through this process the final rating of all employees can be uploaded through an excel
b) manually by using the Edit option for each record as below. The rating scale would be as defined in the setup, it can be a drop down or a box open for entry

3.10  Deleting Employee Record
If an employee has been added to the cycle by mistake or if data for some stages has been filled up erroneously and needs to be corrected the option is available with the Performance Manager.

In the stage release view you also have the "Delete Employee Record" button. Using this button you can delete either the entire performance sheet data for the employee or just the data in the last stage. If you want to delete data for multiple stages you will have to repeat the process multiple times.

Once the data is deleted the stage of employee is reset to either Goals pending (Complete sheet deleted) or Pending stage of previous stage (if only one stage data has been deleted). No alerts are sent to anyone for this activity.

4. Releasing Results

Once the final rating has been updated for an employee his record moves to the Results stage. Results can be released even if the final rating or the annual review process has not been completed for all the employees.

Use the Exclude option if you do not want to release the results for some employees whose final rating has been updated. Click on "Release to Employee" button and the results of the annual performance cycle will be released. When this is done the employees will get an alert notification and can view their final ratings and comments from My Profile page.