Table of contents
- Name - Basics
- Scope - who is assessing the reviewee?
- Questions
- Calibrations
- Timeline
- Notifications
- Visibility
- Confirmation
Kicking off a review cycle based on the template
What are review cycles?
By creating a performance, 360°, leadership, or project review in Leapsome, you are launching a review cycle. A review cycle is a specific timeline of steps that asks for feedback from different teammates based on the scope and timeline you define as an admin. Once you determine the review questions, the timeline of the review, and who is to be assessed, Leapsome automatically handles sending the right questions to the right people at the right time.
This article describes how to set up a review cycle, from creating the template to launching and using the template to start a review.
If you need recommendations or guidance on which type of assessment you should run, check out our best-practice blueprint for reviews.
Please note: Are you setting up a review automation? Then you may also want to look into our Review Automations in Workflows.
Setting up a review template
To create a new review template, go to the 'Reviews' > 'Templates' > 'New Template.' When setting up a template, you will work through the following tabs in order.
1. Name - Basics
Name
The name of your review template will show up in all notifications related to your assessment. Pick an easily identifiable name, such as "360° Performance Review."
Description
The description is optional and can contain the reason for the assessment or general guidelines for giving good feedback. All participants will see this description when filling out their assessment.
Owners
These are the people who will have access to the review cycle's analytics and settings. By default, the person creating the cycle will be the first owner, and you can add as many owners as you like.
Please note: At this stage, you can also define whether HRBPs should have access to the review cycle and see the progress of employees assigned to them. If enabled, HRBPs can edit contributors (e.g., peers), but cannot make any other changes or add participants.
Once you add these details and proceed to the next step, this tab will be referred to as the 'Basics' tab, and the rest of the tabs below will automatically appear.
2. Scope
Leapsome offers three customizable best-practice assessment types:
- Performance Review: Each employee writes a self-evaluation and is assessed by their manager. After the assessment, the employee discusses the results with the manager and signs the results digitally.
- 360° Assessment: This adds the perspective of peers and direct reports of the reviewee. While direct reports are automatically pulled from your employee directory, peers can be nominated by the reviewee or the manager and can be internal colleagues or external collaborators. You can define the minimum / maximum number of peers required for a reviewee. You can also limit the number of times someone can be nominated as a peer in a given review round.
- Leadership Assessment: This enables upward feedback towards managers. Each participant (manager) writes a self-evaluation and can be assessed by direct reports or nominated peers.
The scope consists of several customizable settings:
- Self-assessment: every participant in the cycle will assess themselves.
- Managers: the managers of every participant will assess the reviewee.
- Direct reports: if any participant has direct reports, all their direct reports will assess the reviewee.
- Peers: every participant will either nominate or be assigned peers who will write an assessment of the reviewee.
If you have turned on the 'Peers' option, you can then determine who chooses the peers. They can be nominated by the reviewee and approved automatically or by the manager, selected by the manager or the cycle admin, or external to the company. For peer-only feedback cycles, managers do not need to be included in the scope in order to be able to approve the peer selection.
Please note: If only peers are selected in the scope and no settings for peer selection are defined, admins can manually select peers for participants without input from employees or managers.
Project assessments
By default, line managers assume the manager role for their direct reports in the review cycle. If you want to replace them with project managers for a specific cycle, enable the option 'Manually selected project manager' and select the person who will assume the project manager role. Please note: This setting needs to be enabled within 'Settings' > 'Module & feature settings' > 'Reviews' > 'Advanced features.'
Manager settings
You can choose to automatically update the manager if the reporting line changes during the cycle. With this setting active, managers will be updated immediately within the cycle when they are updated in the 'Employees' section.
If your teams have users with additional managers, you can select 'Include all additional managers in the review scope' if you would like those additional managers to also assess their reports in the review cycle.
3. Questions
Using your Competency Framework
Before you set up your first assessment, set up your competencies and values. You can then compare scores across people and time to understand where specific teams or individuals need support and see how employees improve over time.
Competencies can be company-wide (applicable to anyone in the company) or team-specific (applicable only to members of specific teams). By turning on 'Team-specific competencies,' the system will recognize which team a participant is on and prompt reviewers to assess them on those team competencies. For example, both sales and marketing teams could be participants in the same review cycle but would each be assessed on their respective team-specific competencies.
Leapsome will include your current set of defined competencies when you activate the cycle.
Please note: If you change or edit an existing competency in your Competency Framework, these changes will apply to all previous and ongoing cycles.
Base questionnaire and role-specific questions
Each question can be flexibly targeted to specific reviewer groups. For example, you can include a question that only the manager will see and answer. To choose which reviewer groups respond to a question, click the dropdown 'Ask the question to' under the question and select the desired target group.
To compare perspectives effectively in the analytics module, we recommend targeting different groups with the same question (i.e., asking peers, managers, direct reports, and reviewees the same question to see how their responses differ).
Adding custom questions
You can add custom questions to your assessment. These can be open-ended, multiple-choice, or rated (on the default or a custom scale). See a few best-practice questions you can use.
Please note: If you change an existing question in a template, this will change the question in all past and current cycles that contain that underlying question. If you add or remove a question from a template (or change the order of questions), this will not affect existing cycles.
Adding private questions
When adding a custom question, you can make it private by checking the box 'Make private (only manager and admin can see the question and the response; the question will not be visible to the reviewee in their self-assessment).' Answers to private questions are only visible to admins and the reviewee's manager. They can be recognized in the assessment by a lock icon.
Please note: Total scores will not be displayed to reviewees if private questions are included in the review questionnaire.
Display rules
Display rules allow you to make specific questions visible only to certain teams, users, locations, or other groups within the same review cycle. To add a display rule to a question, click 'Display rules' next to the relevant question in the 'Questions' tab. Please note: This setting needs to be enabled within 'Settings' > 'Module & feature settings' > 'Reviews' > 'Advanced features.'
Including goals
If you are using Leapsome's goal module, you can incorporate goals into your assessment cycles. You can include goals based on the participant's role — as an owner, contributor, key result owner, key result contributor, initiative owner, initiative contributor, or goal manager. To view a participant's progress toward their goals during a review, click on the corresponding goal to be directed to the related page in the Goals module.
Customizing the default scale
You can modify the scale for all scored questions. We recommend defining a default scale for all cycles in the admin settings rather than changing it per review, as changing it for one review will normalize all analytics to 100. You can also choose whether to hide numbers and show only labels in the review form.
4. Calibrations
This is where you configure whether and how scores will be calibrated before they are shared with reviewees. Calibrations are disabled by default.
Once enabled, you can:
- Select which questions are included in the calibration scope (only scored questions where managers are included in the question scope apply).
- Create calibration groups to control who calibrates which employees, who sits on the calibration committee, and which employee attributes (e.g., level, salary) are visible to committee members during calibration.
- Set a calibration kickoff and calibration deadline in the 'Timeline' tab once calibrations are enabled.
Please note: Calibration group creation is limited to superadmins. The 'Calibrations' tab will be locked if managers are not included in the cycle scope.
For a full guide to setting up and running calibrations, see Review calibrations.
5. Timeline
Defining a timeline
In a template, you define the timeline using relative day offsets (e.g., 14 days after kick-off). In a cycle, these become specific dates. The platform will use this to automatically send emails to all participants, reminding them to complete their reviews by the appropriate deadline. Be mindful that timelines are calculated in calendar days, not business days.
Depending on your setup, the timeline may include:
- Kickoff: participants are notified to begin.
- Peer nomination deadline: participants submit their peer selections.
- Peer approval deadline: managers confirm the selected peers.
- Peer / self-assessment / direct report deadline: the respective assessments are due.
- Manager deadline: manager assessments are due.
- Calibration kickoff and calibration deadline (visible only if calibrations are enabled in the 'Calibrations' tab): the calibration kickoff must occur after the manager deadline, and the calibration deadline must fall between the calibration kickoff and the discussion deadline.
- Discussion deadline: for discussions and digital signatures.
- Cycle closure.
You can edit these steps during the assessment process.
Re-submission and sign-off
Within the 'Timeline' tab, the 'Re-submission and sign-off' section allows you to control when submitted assessments become locked for editing. By default, assessments can be edited until the cycle closes. You can change this to lock assessments at the assessment deadline or immediately upon submission, which helps preserve the integrity of the review process and prevent unauthorized changes.
For more details on this setting, see Lock Edits to Assessments After Deadline or Submission.
Receiving automated reminders
While the dates mark the official kick-off of each step, the platform manages the process as efficiently as possible. If a process step completes earlier and all prerequisites for the next step are met, it will automatically move to the next step.
6. Notifications
All review notifications are sent automatically by Leapsome. You can customize each message's text and provide translations in relevant languages. There are three types of notifications in reviews:
- Review kick-off: all participants of the cycle will be notified as soon as the cycle starts.
- Review daily digests: notifications start being sent two days after kick-off. All participants with new tasks will be notified. Peer approval notifications are only sent after the peer nomination deadline has passed. There are no notifications if there are no new tasks.
- Review reminders: all participants with overdue tasks (open for more than three days and fewer than 75 days) will be notified on Tuesdays. Notifications start at least two days after kick-off. There are no notifications if there are no overdue tasks.
You can also configure task reminders to send every weekday, which is particularly useful for cycles with a tight timeline.
7. Visibility
The visibility settings define what admins, managers, and participants can see and when. You can choose different levels of anonymity (for example, hiding a contributor's name from the participant but showing it to the cycle owner).
When setting peer or direct report assessments to anonymous, there are two options:
- 'Anonymous (separate results)': the score and comment of each person are shown, but their name is not associated with the score / comment.
- 'Anonymous (aggregated results)': only the total average score from those peers / direct reports will show in the radar chart. Individual ratings on specific competencies or questions will not be displayed. You need at least two peer answers to show peer scores, and at least two direct-report answers to show direct-report scores. You can see more on this here.
Please note: Participation in a review does not automatically grant the reviewee visibility of all assessments. For example, if a peer submits a peer assessment, the reviewee will only have visibility of that assessment if it is configured in the visibility settings. Additionally, manager assessments cannot be made anonymous.
You will also determine whether managers can share results at any time once they have completed the review, or whether you wish to temporarily block them from sharing — especially useful during calibrations. You will find the setting 'Allow managers to share assessment individually' in the 'Timeline' tab of the review cycle settings; it's not visible at the template level yet.
Please note: Admins, HRBPs, cycle / template owners, and users with custom roles have admin-level visibility for employees in their role scope.
Confirmation
If you are satisfied with your settings, confirm the template setup by clicking 'Save template.'
Kicking off a review cycle based on the template
Once you have finalized your review template, kick off a review by clicking 'Launch new cycle' next to the template name. You will have the option to review each of the settings you configured in the template and adjust them for this specific cycle.
You will have the option to review each of the steps you set up in the process described above. In addition, you can select the participants (reviewees) and the concrete timeline for the cycle.
Important note: It is important to finish a review cycle setup in one session rather than across multiple sessions. While Leapsome does have an auto-save function for draft cycles, it is possible that only the first draft is auto-saved, meaning later changes might not be saved and the launched cycle may not reflect your intentions. If you need input from teammates or need to finish setup in a second session, leave the draft as is, then create a new cycle based on the template and copy-paste any custom sections, descriptions, questions, or notification email texts.
1. Selecting participants
Participants are the employees that will be assessed in this cycle. You can add all employees to a cycle or filter by adding or excluding employees using these selection options:
- By team
- By individual user selection
- By (In)direct reports of
- By locations
- By Legal entities
- By custom attribute
- By levels
- By contributor type
You can also exclude based on tenure. For example, you can include employees who have been with the company for more than X weeks, meaning anyone with the company for less than X weeks at the time of the cycle kickoff, will not be reviewed.
Please note: If employees are excluded from the cycle based on tenure, then they will also be excluded from providing assessments to their managers as a direct report and would need to be added manually to the manager's assessment in the cycle dashboard, in order to provide upward feedback.
Peers will be nominated after your cycle kicks off. Each participant's manager and direct reports will be pulled from your 'Employees' settings (if you're using one of our HRIS integrations, this data is auto-synchronized). If the manager changes before kick-off, it will be updated accordingly.
If no manager is defined, the platform assumes that the cycle owner will write the manager assessment.
2. Adjusting the timeline
When setting up the timeline for the review cycle, you'll get a suggested start date and subsequent dates based on your settings from the template. In the cycle, you can still edit each date.
3. Activate the cycle
You will end your journey at the last tab called 'Visibility'. At the bottom of it, you will see 'Save as draft' and 'Activate' options. If you feel ready to launch the cycle - click 'Activate'.
4. Draft mode in a cycle
Before the kick-off of a cycle, you will have the option to go back to the draft mode of the cycle and edit the settings. Within the draft mode, you can change the participant inclusion/exclusion criteria. However, if participants were already added to the cycle and they were now excluded through the criteria that were changed via draft mode, they will not automatically be removed. Instead, you would need to manually remove the participants from the participant list if they are now part of the exclusion criteria. Similarly, you can launch a new cycle with the new participant inclusion/exclusion criteria if the change in the participant scope adds too much manual work.
Please note: If you make changes to the participant or contributor list in the current status of the cycle, and then go back into draft mode, then all manual changes will be lost. Therefore, please ensure making the changes to the participant list after making any changes to the participant scope in draft mode.