Who can use this feature?
Available on:
All Culture Amp subscriptions that include Performance.
Introduction
The Unified Performance Cycle integrates four key components of performance management—Self-Reflections, Peer Feedback, Upward Feedback, and Manager Reviews—into one streamlined workflow. This ensures consistency and a complete picture of performance across your organization.
This guide will walk you through how to set up, configure, and manage the full performance cycle. However, the process is flexible—you can choose to run the full cycle or customize it with any combination of self-reflections, peer feedback, upward feedback, or manager reviews.
For further details on managing individual components, check out our admin guide to Tracking and Managing a Performance Review Cycle.
What is the Unified Performance Cycle?
The Unified Performance Cycle consolidates four performance components into one unified process:
Self-Reflections: Employees assess their own performance, identify strengths, challenges, and areas for growth.
Peer Feedback: Employees provide feedback on the contributions and collaboration of their peers.
Upward Feedback: Employees offer feedback on their direct or skip-level managers’ leadership and management style.
Manager Reviews: Managers evaluate their direct reports’ performance, growth potential, and alignment with organizational goals.
By combining these components, the Unified Performance Cycle ensures that feedback is gathered from multiple perspectives, helping to provide a well-rounded understanding of employee performance.
Key Benefits of the Unified Performance Cycle
Holistic Feedback: Collect input from self-reflections, peers, managers, and direct reports to get a complete picture of employee performance.
Time Efficiency: Run all feedback cycles simultaneously to eliminate redundant processes and reduce administrative workload.
Consistency: Standardize feedback collection and evaluations across the organization to ensure fairness and transparency.
Actionable Insights: Provide employees and managers with actionable feedback that drives growth and improvement.
Setting Up the Unified Performance Cycle
Here’s how to set up and configure the Unified Performance Cycle for your organization.
Step 1: Navigate to the Performance Cycles Section
Log in to your platform and go to Performance > Performance Cycles under the Admin menu.
Click Create Cycle to start setting up your performance cycle.
Name your cycle: Choose a descriptive name (e.g., “2025 Annual Performance Review”).
Note: If you do not see the 'Create Cycle' option, ensure you have the necessary permissions to create and manage performance cycles. Contact your People Team for assistance.
Step 2: Select Performance Units
You’ll now select which performance components to include in the cycle.
Performance Units to Choose From:
Self-Reflections: Employees complete self-assessments reflecting on their own performance.
Peer Feedback: Enable peer feedback, allowing employees to nominate colleagues to provide feedback.
Upward Feedback: Employees give feedback on their direct or skip-level managers’ leadership and management skills.
Manager Reviews: Managers evaluate their direct reports’ performance, strengths, and areas for growth.
Optional Customizations:
Peer Feedback Nominations: Allow employees to nominate peers for feedback. You can set a limit on the number of nominations per employee (e.g., 5 nominations max). If you set a nomination limit then you have the option to bulk approve nominations to streamline feedback requests.
Upward Feedback Automation: Enable automated feedback requests for direct reports to submit feedback about their direct managers. This eliminates the need to manually assign feedback providers.
Performance Review Acknowledgment: Enable the Performance Review Acknowledgment option so employees can confirm they’ve discussed their review with their manager.
Once you’ve made your selections, click Next to proceed to the next step.
Note: The selected performance units cannot be changed once the cycle has moved to scheduled or live status. Make sure you've selected the ones you need included before scheduling the launch.
Step 3: Customize Questions and Preview
Now that you've selected your performance units, you'll need to customize feedback questions for each component. You can reorder, change, delete, or add new questions to make to align with your organizational goals.
Feedback Questions to Customize:
Self-Reflections: Questions can ask employees to reflect on their achievements, areas for growth, and goals for the next cycle.
Peer Feedback: Questions should focus on collaboration, teamwork, and how peers contribute to each other’s success.
Upward Feedback: Questions for upward feedback can include aspects like leadership effectiveness, decision-making, and communication style.
Manager Reviews: Questions may focus on performance against goals, growth potential, and alignment with company objectives.
Tip: To support high-quality manager feedback, consider enabling Suggest Improvements—a feature that uses AI to guide managers in writing feedback that’s clear, specific, and actionable. See how to turn it on
Types of Questions:
Open-ended questions: Should be used on all performance units to gather specific and actionable feedback.
Rating Scale questions: Use these for measuring agreement or frequency of specific behaviors.
Single-Select questions: These are great for more structured feedback, such as gathering specific responses about team collaboration or goal achievement.
Optional Customizations:
Required Questions: Toggle on to make questions mandatory.
Manager Prompts (Self-Reflections): Provide guidance to managers when reviewing employee self-reflections.
Multilingual Support: You can optionally add translations for your cycle questions so employees can complete their reviews in their preferred language. Learn how to set up a multilingual performance cycle
Once you’ve customized the questions, click Preview to see how they will appear to both managers and employees. After reviewing, click Next to move to configure your sharing settings.
Step 4: Configure Sharing Settings
In this step, you’ll set how feedback will be shared after it’s collected.
Sharing Settings to Configure:
Peer and Upward Feedback: Decide whether feedback can be shared with employees. If shared, employees will see the feedback they received from their peers or direct reports with the reviewer’s name attached.
Manager Reviews: You can also choose which parts of the manager’s review will be shared with employees after the review discussion. It is mandatory to select at least one question to share from this performance unit.
Note: You can un-share questions that were initially marked as shared once the cycle is live, but you can’t enable questions that weren’t initially marked as shareable. Once sharing is enabled for a cycle unit (like manager review, peer, or upward feedback), question-level sharing can’t be changed. Be sure to review your selections carefully before finalizing.
For more details, check out the Admin Guide: Tracking and Managing a Performance Review Cycle.
Tip: Consider the balance between transparency and privacy when setting feedback sharing settings. Learn more about best practices when sharing feedback.
Once you’ve customized the share settings, click Preview to see how the questions will appear to both managers and employees. After configuring your settings, click Next.
Step 5: Assign Employees to the Cycle
In this step, you’ll assign employees to the cycle using one of these methods:
Demographic Filters: Filter employees by department, job title, business unit, or started before date (e.g., exclude new hires from the cycle).
Employee Status: Choose to include only active employees.
Bulk Upload: For larger organizations, you can upload a CSV file with employee emails to assign them quickly.
You can also use the Employee checkbox to select all employees at once.
Once your filters are applied and the employees have been selected, click Next to configure your performance schedule.
Step 6: Set the Schedule
Once you've selected your performance cycle components, it’s time to set the schedule. Start by choosing your time zone to ensure accurate deadlines and notifications.
Then, define the key dates for each step:
Stage | Key Date | Description |
Self-Reflection Period | Launch Date/Time | When employees can begin submitting their self-reflections. |
| Soft Communicated Closure | The deadline for employees to submit their self-reflections. (Employees can still edit after this date, but it helps keep the process moving forward.) |
Peer & Upward Feedback Collection | Step 1: Employee Nominations | Employees nominate peers for feedback. If upward feedback automation is enabled, feedback requests for direct reports will be scheduled during this step. |
| Launch Date/Time | When employees receive notifications and emails to begin submitting their peer nominations. |
| Soft Communicated Closure | The communicated deadline for employees to submit their peer nominations. (Employees can still nominate after this date.) |
Step 2: Review Feedback Requests | Launch Date/Time | Managers begin reviewing and selecting the feedback providers for their direct reports. |
| Soft Communicated Closure | The deadline for managers to select feedback providers. (Managers can still make selections after this date.) |
Approve Nominations (Optional) | Approval Date | When peer nominations are automatically approved, provided the manager hasn’t already requested feedback for their direct reports. (This is optional and only available if a Nomination Limit has been set). |
Step 3: Provide Peer and Upward Feedback | Launch Date/Time | When the selected peers and managers are notified to submit their feedback. |
| Soft Communicated Closure | The deadline for feedback providers to submit their feedback. (Feedback providers can still submit after this date.) |
Manager Reviews | Launch Date/Time | When managers can begin reviewing feedback from peers, self-reflections, and upward feedback, and finalize performance evaluations. |
| Soft Communicated Closure | The communicated deadline for managers to complete their reviews. (Managers can still make edits after this date.) |
Scheduling Tip: To keep the process efficient, aim to schedule each step so that the previous one ends just before the next one starts. For example, complete nominations before starting feedback collection. See an example schedule with suggested time frames for each step.
Step 7: Review the Cycle Setup
Before launching the cycle, you'll get a summary of everything you've set up. This is your chance to double-check the key components:
Performance Units: Confirm which units (Self-Reflections, Peer Feedback, Upward Feedback, Manager Reviews) are included in the cycle.
Questions: Preview the feedback questions for each unit and ensure they align with your goals. You’ll also see which questions will be shared with names attached.
Assigned Employees: Double-check the list of employees assigned to the cycle.
Cycle Timeline: Review the key dates and the overall cycle timeline to make sure everything is in order.
Communications: See a summary of notifications that will be sent to employees and managers throughout the cycle. If needed, you can customize performance review cycle communications before launching.
Step 8: Launch the Cycle
Once you've reviewed and confirmed that everything in your cycle setup is correct, click Schedule to launch your cycle.
Scheduled State: If the start date is in the future, the cycle will be in a "scheduled" state. You can still make changes to the cycle, including editing questions or settings, until the start date arrives.
Live State: On the configured start date, the cycle will automatically move into the live state. This triggers notifications to employees and managers, officially launching the performance cycle.
Once the cycle is live, you can no longer make changes, so be sure everything is set before the start date.
Managing Feedback Configurations
Configuring Feedback Types
You can customize feedback collection during cycle setup:
Peer Feedback Nominations: Limit the number of nominations employees can make (e.g., max 5).
Upward Feedback Automation: Automate feedback requests for direct reports, reducing manual work.
Managing Nominations
Nomination Approval: If peer feedback is enabled, employees nominate peers, and managers approve these nominations. As long as a Nomination Limit is set, Admins can then bulk approve nominations to save time.
Managing Nominations After the Deadline: Admins can still modify feedback requests after the deadline. Any new nominations will automatically trigger feedback requests if bulk approvals are scheduled.
Note: Nomination limits apply only to employees submitting nominations, not to managers or admins.
Automating Upward Feedback Requests
Automated requests are a possible option for upward feedback and are triggered when the cycle is launched. These requests will automatically be sent to employees for upward feedback on their managers. The platform knows which employee is assigned to which manager based on your employee hierarchy.
Manual Adjustments: After the cycle is live, if there are manager changes, admins or managers may need to manually adjust upward feedback requests for affected employees.
Upward Feedback Limitations: If an employee’s manager is not assigned at launch, automated requests will not be triggered. Requests must be manually initiated.
Managing and Reviewing the Unified Performance Cycle
After launching the cycle, you’ll want to monitor its progress and manage feedback collection. Here are a few key steps:
Monitor Feedback Collection: Track the progress of feedback submissions, ensuring that all components (Self-Reflections, Peer Feedback, Upward Feedback, Manager Reviews) are completed within the set timeline.
Adjust Feedback Providers: Admins and managers can add or withdraw feedback providers if needed.
Finalizing Manager Reviews: Managers will review feedback from all sources (peers, self, upward, and manager reviews) and finalize performance evaluations.
Follow-Up: After the reviews are completed, managers should discuss feedback with employees and set actionable goals for improvement.
What's Up Next?
For more details on managing a performance cycle, check out our Admin Guide to Tracking and Managing a Performance Review Cycle.
To ensure fair, consistent performance ratings and improve feedback quality, learn how to Create and Share Calibration Views.
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