Taking notes and providing feedback to employees
Why Use Notes?
Taking notes throughout the year helps create more meaningful and accurate performance reviews. Rather than relying on memory or recent events, notes provide a record of employee performance, accomplishments, coaching conversations, and development opportunities as they occur.
Using the note-taking feature consistently allows managers to provide ongoing feedback while building a comprehensive history of employee performance.
Benefits of Taking Notes
Create More Meaningful Performance Reviews
Notes provide valuable context for competency ratings and support more detailed, evidence-based performance discussions between managers and employees.
Encourage Multiple Perspectives
Depending on your organization's permissions, leaders higher in the reporting structure, such as department heads or team leads, can contribute notes to provide additional insight into an employee's performance.
Promote Continuous Feedback
Regularly documenting feedback helps employees understand how they are performing throughout the year instead of waiting for formal review periods.
Reduce Recency Bias
Performance reviews often emphasize an employee's most recent successes or challenges. Recording notes throughout the review cycle ensures the evaluation reflects performance across the entire review period.
Reduce Review Preparation Time
Maintaining relevant notes throughout the year makes completing employee evaluations more efficient because key examples, accomplishments, and coaching discussions are already documented within Trakstar Perform.
Notes Use Cases
Consistently using Notes throughout the year helps build a more complete picture of employee performance while making review preparation more efficient over time.
Organizations that incorporate note-taking into their performance management process from the beginning can reduce the time required to complete reviews while providing employees with more detailed, meaningful evaluations.
How Notes Benefit the Review Process
As managers become familiar with documenting employee performance throughout the year, the review process often becomes more efficient because important examples and coaching conversations are already captured.
Using Notes consistently helps organizations:
- Build stronger performance documentation.
- Reduce time spent recalling past events.
- Create more thoughtful employee evaluations.
- Establish a habit of continuous feedback.
Notes Use Cases
Different users can leverage Notes in different ways throughout the performance management process.
Managers: Document Employee Performance
Managers primarily use Notes to record observations and feedback for their direct reports.
Common examples include:
Document One-on-One Meetings
Summarize one-on-one conversations to create a record of ongoing coaching discussions.
Notes can capture:
- Progress updates
- Employee concerns
- Career discussions
- Workplace challenges
- Personal circumstances that may affect performance
These records provide valuable context during future performance reviews.
Record Employee Accomplishments
Capture significant achievements as they happen, such as:
- Completing a major project ahead of schedule
- Exceeding performance expectations
- Receiving customer recognition
- Reaching important milestones
Documenting accomplishments throughout the year helps ensure important successes are reflected in the employee's evaluation.
Track Performance Concerns
Managers can also use Notes to document recurring performance issues, including:
- Attendance concerns
- Performance challenges
- Coaching conversations
- Behavioral issues
Maintaining a history of documented observations provides helpful context if additional coaching or corrective action becomes necessary.
Collect 360-Degree Feedback
If your organization uses 360-degree reviews, managers can record feedback received from participants to identify opportunities for improving future assessments and review questions.
Administrators: Request Notes
Administrators can encourage regular note-taking by requesting feedback throughout the review cycle.
Requests can be delivered through:
- Scheduled email reminders
- Custom messages displayed on the Trakstar homepage
Requests can focus on a particular competency, project, or performance topic to encourage detailed manager feedback.
For example, an administrator might request Notes about Project Management, asking managers to describe:
- What went well
- What could be improved
- How project management effectiveness was measured
Employees: Recognize Colleagues
Employees can use Notes to recognize coworkers and teammates for their contributions.
Peer feedback provides managers with additional visibility into collaboration that may not otherwise be observed.
This approach is especially valuable for organizations with:
- Matrix or dotted-line reporting structures
- Cross-functional teams
- Highly collaborative work environments
Employees: Record Self-Notes
Employees can also create Notes for themselves throughout the review period.
Examples include:
- Progress toward competencies
- Major accomplishments
- Completed projects
- Personal circumstances that may affect performance
These Notes can support self-appraisals by providing employees with documented examples of their contributions and development throughout the review cycle.
How Notes Work
Notes help capture ongoing employee feedback by allowing managers and employees to document observations throughout the review cycle.
Notes can be associated with specific competencies to keep feedback organized, are automatically time-stamped for historical reference, and can be shared with employees or kept private based on your organization's needs.
Associate Notes with Competencies
Each employee profile includes the competencies used during their performance evaluation.
When creating a note, you can associate it with a specific competency to provide focused, relevant feedback.
For example, if an employee completes a major project ahead of schedule, you might associate the note with a competency such as:
- Work Quality
- Work-Life Balance
Associating notes with competencies makes it easier to reference supporting examples during the review process.
Time-Stamped History
Every note is automatically time-stamped with the date it was created.
This provides historical context when discussing performance and allows managers and employees to reference specific events throughout the review period.
For example, managers can revisit earlier coaching conversations to discuss progress over time.
Public and Private Notes
When creating a note, you can determine whether it is visible to the employee.
Visible Notes
Visible notes promote transparency by allowing employees to review ongoing feedback throughout the performance cycle.
Private Notes
Private notes can be used to document information that managers want to monitor before discussing it with the employee.
Examples include:
- Monitoring a developing performance concern.
- Recording observations while gathering additional information.
- Documenting recommendations for promotions or compensation discussions pending approval.
Note: Private notes remain visible to Site Administrators.
Best Practices for Taking Notes
To make Notes as effective as possible:
- Encourage thoughtful, professional note-taking.
- Ask questions that promote detailed, actionable feedback.
- Use private notes only when appropriate.
- Ensure every note has a clear purpose.
- Avoid creating unnecessary or repetitive notes that make future reviews more difficult to navigate.
- Deliver important or sensitive feedback directly to employees rather than relying solely on documentation.
Summary
Notes provide a structured way to document employee performance throughout the year. By associating notes with competencies, maintaining a time-stamped history, and using privacy settings appropriately, organizations can support more consistent coaching, better performance conversations, and more meaningful employee evaluations.
Create a Note
Notes allow managers and employees to document feedback, accomplishments, coaching conversations, and other performance-related observations throughout the review cycle.
Create a New Note
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From the Home page, select Notes from the navigation bar.
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Select + New Note in the upper-right corner.
Configure the Note
When creating a note, choose whether it should be visible to the employee.
Visible to Employee
- Yes — The employee can view the note.
- No — The note remains private from the employee.
Note: Notes that are not visible to the employee are still visible to Site Administrators.
Optionally, associate the note with one of the following:
- Competency
- Goal
- Review question
Associating a note with a specific element helps organize feedback and makes it easier to reference during performance reviews.
If no competency, goal, or question is selected, the note is saved to the General Notes section.
When you have finished entering the information, select Add this Note.
Create Notes for Other Employees
If enabled by your administrator, you can also create notes for employees outside of your direct reporting structure by selecting the employee's name before creating the note.
Use Notes During the Scoring Phase
Notes collected throughout the review cycle can be referenced while completing an employee's performance review, helping managers write more detailed and evidence-based evaluations.
View Notes During Scoring
If a note is associated with a specific competency, it appears alongside that competency during the Scoring phase.
Select Notes to view the associated feedback.
You can use these notes to:
- Reference previous coaching or performance discussions.
- Support competency ratings.
- Write more detailed review comments.
Copy Notes to the Review Comments
If you want information from a note to become part of the completed review, you can copy the note into the Comments field for the applicable competency.
You can also use the note as a reference while completing your evaluation without copying it into the review.
View General Notes
Notes that are not associated with a specific competency, goal, or review question appear in the Summary Comments section at the bottom of the review form.
Note Retention
Unless configured otherwise by your administrator, Notes are saved alongside the completed review document for future reference.
Summary
Using Notes during the Scoring phase helps managers create more complete and accurate performance reviews by incorporating feedback and observations collected throughout the review cycle.