Best Practices for Managing Performance Workflows

This topic covers best practices for managing performance workflows, including how to decide whether to edit a workflow that currently has active appraisals associated with it, and whether or not to push those edits to those active appraisals.

General Best Practices
  • Always bulk close appraisals representing previous appraisal periods before launching a new year's appraisals.
  • Always copy your appraisal workflow year to year, and rename the new workflow with the applicable year. This typically requires changing the associations from the previous year.

Deciding Whether to Push Workflow Edits to Active Appraisals

When administrators update a performance workflow associated with active appraisals they are prompted whether they want to update all associated appraisals with these changes. If they select Yes, all associated appraisals still in the first Planning phase will be updated. Think about the following before you update:

  • Pushing workflow edits to previously launched appraisals is typically done only to catch errors post launch.
  • The intent of this functionality is to apply minor corrections, for example changes to schedule end dates, and not to make major changes to appraisal content. For example, if you need to update information in step 2 or step 3 of an appraisal workflow, the Categories and Content data, pushing these changes to previously launched appraisals is not the best practice because new signatures will not be collected for an appraisal workflow edit.
  • If you need to make major changes to active appraisals the best practice is to do a bulk close to cancel the existing launched appraisals associated with the workflow. Then after making the changes to the workflow, do a bulk re-launch. This process will generate the applicable notifications to employees and managers and ensure they have the opportunity to review the updated appraisal content and sign the new appraisal if applicable.