Run a review cycle

What this achieves

Running a cycle means launching it, moving it through its phases as people complete their reviews, and finalising it at the end. Finalising is what writes permanent ratings and releases results to employees.

Required role: Administrator or Manager.

Steps

Go to Performance → Cycles and open the cycle.
Select Launch Cycle and confirm.
Watch the participant statistics as reviews are submitted.
Select Advance to Next Phase when a phase is done, and confirm.
Use Go to Calibration during the calibration phase, where you use it.
Select Complete Cycle at the end and confirm.

Launching creates the participants

Launch Cycle creates a participant record for every employee in scope and activates the first phase. The cycle status becomes Active.

The scope is resolved at this moment, not continuously. Someone who joins HC Corp UK Ltd after launch is not swept into a running cycle.

Tracking progress

The cycle shows four figures, and they are the fastest read on whether it is on track.

Option	Description
Participants	How many people are in the cycle.
Self-reviews submitted	How many employees have completed their own review.
Manager reviews submitted	How many managers have completed theirs.
Released / Acknowledged	How many results have been released, and how many employees have acknowledged them.

Example: if HC Corp UK Ltd’s cycle shows most self-reviews in but few manager reviews as the phase end approaches, the bottleneck is with managers and chasing employees will not help.

Advancing a phase

Advance to Next Phase completes the current phase and activates the next. Some phases require all submissions to be complete before they will advance.

Where submissions are outstanding, Humavera tells you how many people have not completed and offers Skip & Advance. Taking it marks those participants as skipped for that phase and carries them forward with the rest of the cohort.

That is a real outcome for the person skipped: their review for that phase does not happen. It is often the right call for a cohort of hundreds held up by a handful, but make it knowingly rather than to clear a warning.

Example: if two of HC Corp UK Ltd’s managers have not submitted by the phase end, advancing marks their reports skipped for manager review — those employees reach the end of the cycle without a manager rating.

Finalising is the release

Complete Cycle finalises the cycle. It writes permanent rating records for every reviewed participant and releases results to employees, and it cannot be undone.

This is the release gate. Until finalisation, manager ratings and comments are not visible to employees. After it, they are, along with any calibration adjustment.

Example: Olivia Bennett’s rating for James Whitfield stays hidden from him through manager review and calibration. Finalising the cycle is what shows it to him.

Check that calibration is complete and locked before finalising, because finalisation cannot be reversed.

Cancelling

Cancel cycle stops all reviews and writes no rating records at all. It cannot be undone.

Cancelling is not a pause. A cycle you cancel produces nothing — no ratings, no history — so it suits an abandoned round rather than a delayed one.

Rating history

An employee’s ratings across cycles are reachable from their record, which is the view to use when a trend matters more than a single cycle — a rating moving over three years says something one rating does not.

What happens next

Finalised ratings become permanent records feeding compensation, where merit proposals are argued from performance, and reward eligibility rules read from them. Employees acknowledge their results, and the acknowledgement is recorded with the date.