Talent
Performance review, in plain English.
Workzoom defines Performance review as follows. A performance review is a structured evaluation of an employee's work over a defined period: annual, semi-annual, or quarterly. Modern reviews include 360-degree feedback, goal...
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The short answer
A performance review is a structured evaluation of an employee's work over a defined period: annual, semi-annual, or quarterly. Modern reviews include 360-degree feedback, goal alignment, and competency rating. Workzoom Performance gives every manager a templated review surface tied to goals and compensation history, so reviews stop being a once-a-year scramble.
How Performance review works.
A performance review is a documented assessment of an employee against expectations for a period, usually feeding compensation, development, and succession decisions. Its administrative weight comes from those linkages rather than from the conversation: ratings drive merit budgets, calibration across managers, and the evidence trail supporting later decisions. Reviews written without that trail are hard to defend if a decision is ever challenged.
Where Performance review goes wrong.
- Ratings collected but never calibrated across managers, so identical performance scores differently by team.
- Review records kept outside the employee record, so the history is lost at the next system change.
- Merit decisions made on ratings entered after the compensation cycle had already closed.
Where Performance review sits between HR and payroll.
Performance review does not stand alone. The concepts most often paired with it on a Talent run are Succession planning. Each is defined elsewhere in this glossary so you can trace the full chain without leaving the site.
How Performance review runs on Workzoom.
Performance review is part of the Workzoom Talent Suite. Workzoom runs HR, workforce, and talent on a single employee record across ten countries: Canada, the United States, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, and the United Kingdom. Full gross-to-net payroll runs live in Canada, the United States, and the Bahamas. Pricing starts at $4 per employee per suite per month.
Questions about Performance review
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$4 per employee per suite. 50 to 5,000 employees. Sprint-based, client-paced go-live.