Reviews

Setting Up and Managing Employee Reviews: A Step-by-Step Guide - Quick Setup

 


In today's bustling business world, it's more crucial than ever to focus on employee growth and performance. Organizations count on structured review cycles to assess progress, align goals, and promote effective teamwork. In this guide, we'll walk you through how to set up your first review cycle on Keka.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Getting Started

Start by going to the Performance section, and from there, open the Review tab. You may be greeted by a welcome video that offers valuable insights into the importance of performance reviews and key considerations for initiating and managing them effectively. When you click on Start Review Setup, you have two options to choose from.

 

Quick Setup: This is a streamlined process that's particularly useful for small and medium-sized companies.

Advanced Setup: This option offers additional customization features that are ideal for larger companies with multiple review cycles.

 

Quick Setup

Quick Setup simplifies the process into four main steps, which you'll see on the left pane of your screen. These steps are Review Cycle, Reviewers, Review Forms, and Map Employees. If you ever feel the need to switch to Advanced Setup, that option is also available to you here.

 

 

Review Cycle 

Here, you'll give a Name and a Description of the review cycle you're creating. This helps differentiate various cycles, especially if your organization runs multiple review cycles.

 

 

Reviewers 

In this step, you decide who will provide feedback to the employees. The default setting includes Self and Reporting Managers, but you can include additional roles or specific employees by clicking +Add More Reviewers.

 

Review Forms 

This is where you set up the review forms, consisting of two sub-steps. First, you have to select the type of rating scale you want to use, which could be a Star-based or Custom rating. You can also enable ratings in decimal increments, like 0.5. However, In the Custom scale, you can use any value, such as 3.27. 

Once the rating type is decided, you proceed to configure the settings of the review forms. You can determine which of the selected reviewers must fill out the form and edit the questions for each reviewer.

For details on how to add questions, click here.

You can enable reviewers to evaluate an employee's performance in key areas of the organization, such as Goals, Core Values Projects, Competencies & Skills. Moreover, you can configure the order in which these review aspects will appear on the reviewer's form.

 

In the Goals section, you can specify which time period's objectives should be reviewed. You also get to select the reviewers and the types of responses they can offer. Additionally, the system can auto-fill the ratings based on the progress made towards these goals. You can include sub-goals in the review, but this is generally not advised.

You will also see an option to auto calculate ratings based on the goal progress.

Calculation of Pre-filled Ratings:

The methodology for calculating pre-filled ratings is as follows:

  • Objective/Goal/KRA Rating: The highest value on the selected rating scale for the Objectives/Goals/KRAs section is multiplied by the goal's progress percentage and then divided by 100.
    • Without Decimal Ratings: If decimal ratings are not enabled, the result is rounded to the nearest whole number. For instance, values between 1-1.5 are rounded down to 1, while those between 1.5-2 are rounded up to 2.
    • With Decimal Ratings: If decimal ratings are enabled, the result is rounded to the nearest value within a difference of 0.5. For example, values between 1-1.25 are rounded down to 1, those between 1.25-1.75 are rounded to 1.5, and between 1.75-2 are rounded up to 2.
  • Key-Result/Sub-Goal/KPI Rating: If the option to base ratings on Key-Results/Sub-Goals/KPIs progress is selected, then ratings are pre-filled at the individual Key-Result/Sub-Goal/KPI level according to their progress. The overall rating for the Objective/Goal/KRA is calculated cumulatively based on the ratings of all its Key-Results/Sub-Goals/KPIs.

For the Competencies segment, you can determine who will provide feedback and what kind of responses they can give. You can also specify which competencies each reviewer should focus on.

The settings for Core Values & Projects are similar. You choose the reviewers and define the response types, customizing the review to fit your organization's needs.

For Skills you choose the reviewers and define the response types and also you can choose which category each reviewer should focus on.

Then, under additional settings, you will find options to allocate different weights for each reviewer and for each parameter if you have enabled ratings. You can also provide a personal message to guide the reviewers through the review process.

If you want the reviewers to suggest a rating different from the auto-calculated one, you can turn on the Proposed Rating feature. This feature enables a reviewer to offer a different overall rating for the employee. After that, you can choose who has the authority to finalize this proposed rating.

 

Lastly, you can set additional rules for reviewers under Additional Options. These rules include requiring comments, allowing attachments, or permitting them to skip ratings.

Map Employees

In this last step of Quick Setup, you decide which employees will participate in this review cycle. You also have the option to assign people to manage the cycle. You can create different groups of employees within the same review cycle if you want to assign different managers and questions to various employee groups. For adding employees to each group, you have three methods to choose from Condition-based, Manual Selection, or bulk Import from Excel/CSV.

Managing Review Groups and Cycles

After setting up the review cycle, you can still modify settings for each group as needed. This includes the option to change questions and other settings that we've discussed earlier.

Any modifications made to the questions or any other aspect of reviews will not automatically update for employees for whom the review has already been launched. To apply these changes, you will need to cancel and restart the reviews.


And there you go! That's how you set up a review cycle using Quick Setup. Remember, you can always save your settings and come back later if you need to make adjustments.