Setting up review cycles for your organization on Ally is fairly simple. This can be done in 5 simple steps.

And Launch Review Cycle!!

This article will walk you through these five steps and help you create and launch a new review cycle. Once you are on Ally, Click on the Performance->Review option on the left navigation pane. This will take you to the Reviews home page.

Under the Reviews page, "All Reviews" is the section from where the Admin can create or manage the review cycles for the organization. The section has a '+ New Review Cycle' button. Clicking on this button opens up New review cycle creation dialog as shown below.

Give a name to the review cycle in the given text box. Specify the period for which you are doing the assessment. For example, If you are doing an annual review for the period 1st Jan 2020 to 31st Dec 2020, specify that in the date range. Once this is mentioned, we are good to configure the review cycle.

The first step is to add the participants who will be part of the review cycle. You can also add everyone in the organization by including the tag as shown below. Alternatively, you can also add specific people to the review cycle by their names. You can also exclude participants by their name by clicking on the exclude check box shown below and entering the names.

Once you have added the participants, By clicking on the continue button, you can configure the questionnaire for self and manager review.

Your OKRs and Projects might be the place where you are generally tracking your business goals and keep track of the progress. So it completely makes sense that. you might want to anchor your review cycles around these OKRs.

Ally makes this very simple. Keep the achievements section on this page toggled ON. This includes the participant's OKRs to the review process. The participant can provide their reflection on each of these goals. The participants can provide specific information about what went well, things that could have been better, and their key learnings towards each of their OKRs and Projects.

If you do not want to include OKRs in the review cycle, you can toggle off the achievements section.

More often companies wanted to assess employees on more parameters apart from Business goals. This could vary from culture and values of the company, Competencies, Behavioral attributes, etc. The way most organizations prefer to do this is by defining the questionnaire under each head (Ex. Culture and values) in their review cycles to which managers and employees respond.

You can create sections for each of these parameters (eg. Culture and Values) and define any number of questions under each section. Clicking on the "Add Another Section" Creates a new section. Give a section title and description. You can create text or numerical scale-based questions under each section.

For each of the questions, you can customize if the question is meant only for employees (Self-review) or managers (manager review), or both.

You can also choose not to share the manager's responses with the participants for specific questions after the review results are shared. Uncheck the "Share Manager's response with employees option" if you choose not to share.

Configuring Overall Rating

( Ratings for the organizations can be configured from the Reviews home page by clicking the Rating Levels tab )

The self and manager review page has an 'Overall rating' as you can see in the above images, Keeping this section toggled ON will let the manager provide an overall rating to the candidate. This is based on the rating scale that has been configured already for the organization. Like other sections, this is also customizable. You can configure if even the review candidate should provide a self-rating.

This is kept ON by default. Toggle this off if you do not want to have ratings and wish to keep this as a purely feedback-only cycle.

Now that all essential things for self and manager review have been configured, click Save and continue to move to the next step, which is configuring peer reviews.

Peer reviews help to collect feedback from the co-workers of the review candidate and other managers the candidate had been working with. Collecting peer reviews provide a more democratic picture of the candidate's performance and will help the manager to make a more accurate judgment of the review candidate's performance. Peer reviews follow the following process.

Peer reviews are turned ON by default and you can toggle it off if you do not want to collect peer feedback within review cycles.

You can configure if peers will be nominated only by managers or employees can nominate as well. By default, both will be able to nominate.

You can configure how many peers the participants will be able to nominate subject to a maximum of 10.

There are four peer review questions provided on Ally by default based on best practices. However, you can override or add more questions for peers here as per your preference.

You can also configure if peer responses can be shared with the review participants or only with the managers and admins under the Visibility section.

Now that Peers reviews are configured, click Save and Continue to move to the final stage of creating the review cycle.

In the last section you can configure the following,

You can configure the deadline for each of the stages. Configuring this deadline will not block the user from continuing with that step beyond the deadline. However, email reminders will be sent as configured before the specified deadline. You can also customize how many days prior to the deadline, the email reminder should be sent.

More often, the reviews should be (calibrated and) Approved post manager review. In this last step, under the Review Approval section you can configure who among the following should approve these reviews post the manager review.

Post Manager review, the review will be sent to this approver for their approval. The Approver can either approve or request for changes to the manager at this point. Once the approval is complete the review is ready to be shared back with the review candidates.

If you do not want to have an approval process, you can toggle this off.

In this last step, You can also configure who can share the review results back with the review participants. By default performance, administrators can share the reviews. You can allow managers as well to share the results by configuring under the "Sharing" section.

Now All the configuration for the review cycle is complete. You can save the review as a draft or Launch it right away for the chosen participants.

Once the review cycle is launched all the participants and managers will receive an email notification asking them to complete the peer nomination and the self-review for the review cycle.

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Individual Performance Management in Ally is available across all our pricing plans. If you would like to have it enabled for your organization please have an account admin reach out to [email protected] with your request.