Trakstar Academy - Forms 101

A form consists of the questions, competencies, and elements your employees and managers fill out to score and complete their reviews.  Forms can be built in various ways and then assigned to your employees.  

• A Position is a form assigned to an employee for performance review.  
• Positions can be built for individual roles and departments or used across the entire organization.  
• Positions consist of specific sections that hold the competencies & questions that make up the performance review.

This article will guide you through creating your forms and positions.  Enroll in our eLearning course, or scroll down to learn more!

1. Create Your Rating Scale 

Elements, like competencies, are scored with Rating Scales.  Your rating scale can have between 1-10 levels, with the option of adding a n/a (not applicable) checkbox.  Each level must have a valued associate with it.  Since everything in Perform is scored out of 100, we recommend following these formulas, depending on the number of levels you have.

Learn more about creating & editing a rating scale here.

Here are some examples of descriptive words for each value of your rating scale:

Rating Scales can also be enabled in Goals.  This is how employees and managers score their goals during the review process.  We suggest building out a goal-specific rating scale for your Perform account.

Tips for Rating Scales

• Want to create a yes or no rating scale?  Add it in using a two-level scale of 50 and 100!
• Lowest value on a rating scale should never be zero – it will skew scores too low 

2. Add or Edit Competencies

Competencies are ratable elements with a position.  These can be anything you'd like tied to the rating scale - such as hard or soft skills or company values.  Perform has an entire competency library with one hundred competencies pre-built into your site for you!  These competencies include behavioral, leadership, performance, and value-based options.  We have included Coaching Tips for Managers to provide even more guidance when working with an employee's review.  You can view all of the competencies here. Many competencies include an option to override the description for each level within the rating scale, so you can further customize it as needed. 

When it comes to including competencies on your form, keep it simple!  We recommend keeping the number of competencies to five to seven to avoid overwhelming your employees.

You can build these within your account via Forms > Competencies if you'd prefer competencies specific to your organization.  For details and step-by-step directions, click here.

3. Add or Edit Sections

Let's create our sections - these are the folders that house the pieces of paper and keep everything nicely organized!

You have a lot of control over the contents of your sections.  You can allow managers or employees to modify the section further (such as adding goals or a manager changing the weight of competencies), make specific sections scorable by employees, managers, or 360-Raters, or even hide sections from employees (see more on hiding sections with Succession Planning below!).

To learn more about creating & editing sections, click here!

Note: Setting the weight of sections at 0% is not a good idea– this will prevent the system from calculating a raw score.  Your best option is to choose hidden score formatting, allowing you to show a numeric score if needed retroactively. If you don’t want employees to see the weighting of sections, uncheck the Show Weights box.

Add or Edit Questions

Questions are elements within a section that allows the employee or manager to answer with a text box.  Any questions added are required and will have a red outline around the text box.  While filling out the question, the employee or manager can use the rich HTML tools to format their answer or add attachments.  You add questions directly to the section - you don't need to create them before creating the section, as with competencies.  Questions are not scored.

Grouping Elements in Sections

We recommend that you group similar elements within your sections.  For example, you keep all your questions in one section and all competencies in another.  This will keep your forms organized and concise and allow you to adjust weights accordingly.  Sections with competencies will return a value based on your score formatting, while sections with questions will not.

Allowing Modifications & Allowing Goals

If you'd like your team to be able to add or remove goals from their review, you'll want to be sure your section Allows Modifications.  Managers and employees can add their goals if checked for your Goals section.

Who Scores the Section?

You can select who will fill out or score a specific section.  For example, you may want a section set aside for employee self-reflection.  This would be designated as Scorable by the Employee.

Succession Planning and Hidden Sections

If you use Succession Planning, you will have the ability to hide sections from your employees.  These sections are used to graph the employees on the nine-box grid for the Succession Planning report.  Managers can use hidden sections related to their employees - for example, you could ask, "Is this employee eligible for a promotion or raise?" for the manager to answer but have it hidden from the employee.

It's important to know thatonce a section is hidden, you cannot change it.  In addition, hidden section ratings are not included in the overall rating for the employee or count towards reporting or Insights.

Don't see succession planning in your account but want to get started?  Reach out to the support team or your account manager!

4. Add or Edit Positions

Now that we've created the content (competencies & questions) and organized it into folders (sections), it's time to put it into our filing cabinet - the position!

Add the sections into the corresponding positions.  Click on the orange Add Element button, then select where you'd like this element to go within your section.  You can move them later.

You will see the option to include a single-use section.  This is an option if you want to build out something ad hoc, but we suggest following the above directions to build your questions, competencies, sections, & positions, so you can re-use them as needed.

Click here to learn more about adding a position.

5. Assign Your Positions!

Once you’ve created all your positions, the final step is to assign them to your employees! You can do this individually or using theBulk Edit feature after selecting employees.

This will be under individual employees' profiles, then Review Set > Positions.  

For bulk editing employees, this will be under Review Details > Position.

Best Practices for Review Forms

• Keep review forms to ten to twelve elements at the most.
• Unless you have particular needs, we suggest using a single form for every employee.
• You cannot delete positions, sections, or competencies in bulk.
• You can utilize the number of elements to track the contents of reviews.
• A traffic cone icon means that the position is blank.
• If you are utilizing an integration from your HRIS, adding a new position from your source of truth will result in a blank form being created - unless your settings copy contents from an existing position or form.
• If you want to change an employee's position, you will lose data if the review is in scoring.  Goals and Notes will never be lost. You can learn more here.
• If you delete a Goals section and employees or managers have already added goals to their review, these will become free-floating.
• Allow Modifications will have to be enabled on the position level to allow them to be deleted. 
• We suggest having employees delete goals or turn off Carry Forward Goals before removing a Goals section to avoid this issue.
• Copying a blank position into a position with content will overwrite the content of the position, so be careful.
• Summary comments will always appear but are entirely optional.