We deliver these releases to improve your experience and the value, functionality, and features of StaffCircle.
This release update provides you with a brief, high-level description of any new and updated features along with any bugs that have been fixed.
TLDR; Reviews have been enhanced to provide flexibility to who can see the review depending on what state it’s in. We’ve also opened up Skills Assessments within Reviews and the Importer Tools to help you get the Roles and Skills into the platform.
SENSITIVE REVIEWS
The StaffCircle platform has always been great at being able to conduct probation reviews, 1-2-1s and annual appraisals but with HR practices ever evolving we knew we needed to introduce some additionality flexibility, to open up the other types of reviews you can carry out with or against an employee. For example, Employee Mental Health and Wellbeing Check-ins can now be captured in the platform as you’re able to select which Users, Groups, Departments or Sites can view the review detail. Don’t forget, just because someone might be a Super User doesn’t mean they should be privvy to confidential employee information!
SETTINGS>REVIEW NAVIGATION
When you go to Settings>Objectives & Reviews, you’ll notice that we’ve re-ordered the tabs, introducing section specific sub-tabs. You’ll now see the following within Reviews:
Templates
Feedback Questions
Intervals
Settings
Review Templates
To ensure we’re utilising consistent terminology across the platform, we’ve renamed Review Types to Templates. You’ll see this terminology across all Reviews within the platform.
SETTINGS>OBJECTIVES & REVIEWS>REVIEWS>TEMPLATES
There’re a few fundamental changes we’ve made to the way you create and utilise templates. One of those enhancements we’ve made is the introduction of a Sensitive Review icon.
This gives your users instant visibility that the template or review they’re viewing has a sensitive nature. This icon is visible on the:
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List of review templates in your platform
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New Review Template Wizard
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Slide out panel when updating an existing Review Template
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Add Review panel that your users see when selecting a review template to use
REVIEW TEMPLATE LIST
When on this page you’ll see an additional column to show whether a template is sensitive as well as an additional icon in your filters so you can see just the sensitive templates.
ADD REVIEW TEMPLATE
For those of you with previous exposure to the Review Settings area of the platform, you will be used to the single page add review form we were using. To enable you to have more flexibility over who can see what and when, we’ve enhanced the form to a wizard and you’ll now see a more logical order to the way you create templates.
PAGE ONE: INFORMATION, SETTINGS & NOTIFICATIONS
Information
Within this section you can provide a Title and Description for your template as well as selecting a template folder.
Settings
Basic settings can be applied to the template to highlight whether it’s a sensitive review, if you’d like to score the reviewee, if the review recurrs, etc.
Experienced template creators will notice some of the sliders you previously used are no longer on this page, but not to worry, we’ve only moved them to other pages in the wizard!
Notifications
All of the existing notification sliders are available in this section, allowing you to decide which notifications are received.
PAGE TWO: REVIEW VISIBILITY & ACCESS: WHO CAN USE THE TEMPLATE
Sometimes everyone in the company needs to have access to a Review Template such as “Weekly 1-2-1”, whereas other’s only need access to a very small number of templates such as an “Employee Wellbeing Check-In”. You might find that you have Department specific reviews such as a “Product & Development Probation Review” or reviews that only a certain Group of people need to have access to like a “Skills & Development Assessment” for your Department Heads and Training Group.
Page Two of the Review Template wizard enables you to select whether a template can be selected by any user in the company (through the Myself mode)
Or if you only want the template to be available to certain Users, Groups, Departments or Sites.
If you’re not sure who’s in that grouping of people, you can click the avatar and you’ll be presented with the list of people inside that grouping.
PAGE THREE: REVIEW VISIBILITY & ACCESS: WHO NEEDS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE REVIEW
We have updated the terminology and design of this page to make it clear that whichever ‘type’ you select here, will participate in the review and provide answers to feedback questions. All you have to do is select the question set you’d like them to answer and their card will show as selected.
You’ll notice each participant card has a “Default Viewer” available. This simply adds that participant type to pages four and five, meaning you don’t have to add them again!
PAGE FOUR: REVIEW VISIBILITY & ACCESS: WHO CAN SEE THE REVIEW WHILST IT’S IN PROGRESS
Over the next two pages you’ll be able to select which Users, Groups, Departments and/or Sites can view a review whilst it’s in progress. This function comes in handy if, for example, you’ve got a Mental Health First Aider conducting Wellbeing Check-Ins with everyone. You would have already set them as the group that can use the template, and within this section you can give them viewer access to see the review in progress. What this also means is that the employee’s manager, who might not have that Mental Health First Aider training and doesn’t need to be privvy to the information, won’t be able to see the detail of the review.
PAGE FIVE: REVIEW VISIBILITY & ACCESS: WHO CAN SEE THE REVIEW ONCE IT’S COMPLETE
As with Page Four, this page allows you to select Users, Groups, Departments and/or Sites that can view a review once it’s been completed. A good use for only having users on this list is when it comes to disciplinaries and grievances. Usually there’s only a small group of people involved in the actual process which need to have that visibility along the way (they’d be selected on Page Four), but once the process is complete your HR Department might then need viewer access to completed reviews. That way the HR function is kept up to date without clogging up their In Progress list with review types they’re not directly involved in.
PAGE SIX: ADDITIONAL SECTIONS
If you’ve used the Reviews feature before you’ll remember that you could select whether or not to include the open Objectives for an employee. This function is still available however, we’ve moved it to it’s own additional sections page, which paves the way for us to continue to develop this area in the future and give you other areas of the platform you can pull in.
We’ve also introduced a new additional feature called “Review should include Skills Assessment”, but more on that a bit further down…
PAGE SEVEN: SUMMARY
And your last page is your one stop summary page to make sure you’re happy with your selections before pressing SAVE and creating the template. Don’t worry if you need to make amendments, the update function is still available in the elipsis menu where it’s always been.
MANAGE>OBJECTIVES & REVIEWS>REVIEWS
As a user that can create and conduct reviews for employees, when a Review Template is marked as sensitive, they will be able to see this and be mindful of the subject matter they're looking to discuss.
The sensitive icon can be seen on the list of open reviews.
When selecting a template to use.
And when conducting the sensitive review type.
SKILLS ASSESSMENT
Above we mentioned the Skills Assessment toggle within the Additional Sections page to the new Review Templates.
For the last 12 months you've been able to add Skills and Skill Levels to the platform, as well as benchmarking Skill Levels against the Roles. These two things alone gave you the ability to see whether someone was ready for a promotion or needed additional training.
Now you're able to add a Skills Assessment section to a review enabling you to focus on the individual employee and where they sit against where you think they should be for their Role.
COMPLETING A SKILLS ASSESSMENT
If you're using a Review Template that includes the Skills Assessment, you'll see an additional section available when conducting a Review.
Within this tab you're able to review the current Skills and Skill Levels associated to the employee, as well as add additional skills from within the platform.
Any Skill Levels you set against the Role will also be reflected in this section, showing whether someone is in a deficit, matches or exceeds the level they need for the role.
Should the employee have additional skills outside of their role, you can create these in the platform and then select them within the skills assessment by clicking the '+' button in the top right of the section.
Any skill added that isn't associated to the role will have the relevant skill level shown in yellow.
Overall assessment comments can be made within the Review and will be reflected in the summary panel as well as the review details page.
Over on the left you'll see the summary panel that also contains a quick snapshot of the skills, levels and comment made during the assessment.
UPDATES TO THE TIMELINE
At the end of August last year, Release v.1.27.0, we updated the employee timeline to include much richer information.
Now when you conduct and complete a Skills Assessment with your employees their Timeline will be updated to reflect this and you can see the Timeline in realtime on the review details page.
