Best Practices: What to Review Before Launching Mitratech’s Trakstar Perform
Your processes are set, your forms are ready, and it's almost time to kick off your reviews! Follow these steps to ensure everything goes smoothly when those reviews open.
Train Your Team
We have resources to help you train your employees and managers on navigating and using Perform. These step-by-step eLearning courses cover the basics for each of these roles:
Your team can self-enroll in these courses, so feel free to send the links directly to them!
Quick Tip: As an Admin, do you need a quick refresher, too? We have an Admin Training Course ready for you!
Are you planning your internal training? Feel free to use our slides to introduce your team to Perform! Click on File > Make a Copy > Entire Presentation to make your copy to edit!
Enable Email Notifications
Select Company > Settings and Enable Email Notifications. Learn more here!
Pro Tip: We suggest putting your Company Name in the Email Notifications From field so your employees know the message is coming from your Perform instance.
Sending Out the Welcome Email
The welcome email invites your team to your Perform account with a temporary password. Go to Employees > Active, and select all users you want to send the welcome email to.
Click on Bulk Edit in the top right corner. This will bring up a page to edit these employees. Scroll down to Send Welcome Email - click to end!
Some organizations use Single Sign-On (SSO) for login. If your organization has SSO enabled, you’ll be automatically logged in and will not need a Welcome Email.
Going Live with Reviews
Best Practices Before Review Launch
- Update the Welcome Message your team will see when they log in! Learn more here.
- Ensure your forms reflect precisely what you'd like - these cannot be edited once the review cycle has started. Learn more here.
Tips for Goals & Notes
The Goals & Notes phase allows both employees and managers to add notes and goals to their review before the official scoring. Here are some resources specific to adding goals and notes to reviews from both user levels.
Bypass Goals & Notes - Go Right to Scoring!
You may want to bypass the Goals & Notes phase and go straight into the Scoring phase with your employees. To get started, you'll want to look over the Process details to ensure everything is set correctly.
- Schedule: Do the dates reflect when you want the reviews to occur?
- Approval Process: Are all approvers on the list aware of how to approve reviews? If not, direct them to Trakstar Academy to learn how!
- Process: Have any other details changed since implementation?
- If you change the process, we recommend updating all employees once finalized. This can be done via Employees > Active > Bulk Edit > Update Process
New Hire Processes
Before you launch your reviews, consider what kind of ad hoc reviews you may also add. The most popular one is a new hire review, set for a specific number of days from their base date or hire date.
When setting this ad hoc review, think about if you’d like the Goals, Notes, & Measurements to carry forward from the specific new hire review to their next review-cycle associated review.
If the answer is Yes, I want my goals, notes, & measurements to carry forward to the following review-cycle review.
You can set up these dates within your process as a “one-time” schedule via Processes > Schedule, as seen in the screenshot below.
If the answer is No, I do not want the goals, measurements, & notes to carry forward to the following review-cycle review; you’ll want to create an entirely new process for your New Hires, set with the cadence or timing you choose (such as thirty, sixty, or ninety days from their base date)
Note: If you set up a separate process for New Hires, once the employee has reached the date of their ad-hoc review (i.e., ninety days from hire - whatever you set up in your New Hire process), you MUST manually reassign the employee to your primary process.
360-Rater Feedback
Suppose your team uses 360-Rater Feedback; set up your forms with specific sections for the raters to score. You can do this via Forms > Review Template, which can be changed for each section by clicking on the pencil icon and adjusting who can provide a score.
Want to customize your 360-Rater Feedback options even further? You can make certain sections scorable by groups or specific people. For example, if you want to collect Upward Feedback where the Direct Report will rate their managers. You can set this by going into the employee's review, clicking on 360-Rater Feedback, and adjusting the settings of each Group. Click on Edit next to the Group you'd like to adjust, as seen in the screenshot below:
Now you can decide which elements to include for that specific group to rate and add additional instructions or details for the group members to see when you request the feedback.
To help manage this process for your managers, you can also set up pre-defined groups within your process that will populate based on specific settings. When sending the 360-Rater Feedback Request, the manager or admin must confirm or delete these. Learn more about 360-Rater Groups here!
Review Clean Up
Perform a review clean-up to ensure no honest reviews from past cycles. Only completed reviews are archived automatically so that any incomplete reviews will remain open until completion.
Clearing out incomplete reviews is best done by bulk editing. First, you'll want to determine where the review is stuck. Check out Reviews > Scoring to take a closer look.
Are the employee's self-review and manager review complete?
Cancel approval (if the review has been sent for approval) and then force archive in a bulk edit. Choose Approval Actions > Cancel Approval for all Scoring reviews to cancel the approval. To archive, select Archive Actions > Archive all completed reviews.
Is the manager's review incomplete?
If the manager has not completed the review, you have the following options:
- The manager can complete the review document
- You can proxy as them to complete it on their behalf
- You can cancel the review
Is the employee's self-review incomplete?
If the employee has not completed their review, you can either:
- Remind them to complete.
- Override the self-review
Access these options via Review > Scoring, and click on the employee's name. Select if you'd like to override the review or remind the employee. These actions can also be completed in bulk.
Canceling a review is permanent, and reviews cannot be uncanceled. While employees and managers cannot access canceled reviews, admins can retrieve these reviews under Reviews Canceled Reviews. You can cancel reviews in bulk by choosing Cancel Reviews at the bottom of the bulk edit screen.
Note: Cancelling Approval for a review will remove any approver comments. Be sure to save these externally if you want to have them!
If the manager's review is complete, but the employee's self-review is not, you can override the self-review in a bulk edit by choosing Self-Review Actions > Override Self-Review. Once the self-review is overridden, you can archive the review in a bulk edit.
These tasks will ensure that all incomplete reviews have been cleaned up and your account is ready for your new cycle.
Glossary
Learn more about what the icons and buttons in Perform mean, or learn about all the terms in Perform!
Still have questions?
Don't worry; we've got answers. Email us at perform@trakstar.com