Setting up a review cycle and campaign

This article is for administrators who organise review periods. A cycle is the period that objectives, meetings and reviews relate to; it becomes a campaign as soon as steps are added to it (self review, manager review and so on). It explains how to create a cycle, set up the campaign, define its steps and participants, and carry it over from one period to the next. Launching and tracking are described in Launching, tracking and closing a campaign.

Before you start #

• The Performance module must be installed for your workspace.
• Seeing a cycle’s settings and its Steps and Participants tabs: “Settings — Review cycles (steps, population)”, Access level. Creating, configuring, duplicating, closing and deleting a cycle: Execute level. By default, only the administrator role holds this permission.
• Permissions are set in Settings › Manage Employees › Employee Roles, PERFORMANCE section.
• Prepare at least one active form template: see Designing review forms.

The list of cycles #

Open Settings › Performance › Review cycles. Cycles are grouped by year. Each row shows the name, the status, the periodicity, the technical identifier (for example 2026-Q3), the start and end dates and the number of linked items (objectives, reviews, meetings and comments).

Without any cycle, every screen of the module shows the full history.

Creating a cycle #

1. Click New cycle.
2. Choose the Periodicity: Annual, Half-yearly, Quarterly (the default) or Monthly.
3. Choose the Year and then the Period (except for an annual cycle). Periods are listed with French abbreviations: T1 to T4 for quarters, S1 and S2 for half-years, and French month names.
4. The Start and End fields take the bounds of the period. Shift them if your financial year does not follow the calendar year; the screen then reminds you of the original bounds.
5. Enter a Display name if you wish; one is suggested (for example “T3 2026”). The technical identifier shown below the field will not change.
6. Click Create. The cycle starts in Draft status.

A period can only carry one cycle: if it is already covered, the screen shows “A cycle already covers this period.” and the button stays greyed out.

Setting up the campaign #

Click a cycle’s chevron (“View steps and participants”) to expand it. Four settings blocks appear, followed by the Steps, Participants and Progress tabs.

Period covered #

The cycle’s Start and End dates can be changed as long as it is not closed. Click Save after changing them.

End-of-cycle dossier validation #

This setting decides how each employee’s dossier is validated at the end of the cycle (see The end-of-cycle dossier: validating and signing):

• In-app validation (the default): the employee and the company validate inside Illizeo. Acceptance is timestamped and traced; it is not a qualified electronic signature.
• Electronic signature: the frozen dossier is sent for signature to the electronic signature provider connected to your workspace (DocuSign, or otherwise UgoSign). Without a connected provider, sending the dossier is refused.
• No signature: the cycle has nothing validated. It is the only mode that allows a step to stay hidden from the employee.

Review unit #

For employees with several contracts: One review per person (the default) produces a single dossier per employee; One review per contract produces one dossier per contract, each assessed by the manager of that contract. This choice can only be changed in draft: once the population is recorded, it is locked.

Evaluation form #

Choose the form used by steps that have no form of their own, or “None — each step carries its own”. Only active templates are offered. The choice is locked as soon as steps have produced reviews with this form.

Defining the steps #

In the Steps tab (“Campaign steps”), click Add a step. A cycle with no steps is only a period; a typical campaign runs a self review followed by a manager review.

Then complete the window:

1. Label (required), for example “Q3 self review”.
2. Form: the cycle’s form, or a form specific to the step. An employee and their manager are not necessarily asked the same questions.
3. Start and End (required). A passed deadline flags a delay without locking input: only closing the cycle freezes the content.
4. Wait for submission of: “None — starts on its date”, or another step. This is how you get “employee first, then manager”: the manager review only opens, for each employee, once their self review has been submitted.
5. If the step waits for another one, The contributor sees the previous step: From the start, After submitting, or Never.
6. The subject sees the review about them: On finalization (the default), On signature request, or Never (only offered in “No signature” mode). Private questions stay hidden in every case.
7. Click Add.

Each row of the list shows the type, the step status (Upcoming, Running, Ended), its dates, its form and its dependency. An alert flags a step without a form, which would produce no review. The Move up, Move down, Edit and Delete icons manage the list.

Peer review #

For a “Peer review” step, the Peer nomination block is added to the window:

• Who chooses the peers: “The reviewed employee proposes” (the default), “The manager chooses” or “HR chooses”. Proposals and nominations are made in the To fill tab of each person’s Performance space; in “HR chooses” mode, managers do not take part.
• Minimum peers (1 by default) and Maximum peers (5 by default, 20 at most).
• If the employee proposes: The manager approves the proposed peers (ticked by default).

Without a nominated peer, no peer review is created for the employee, and a step that waits for the peer review stays pending for them.

Choosing the participants #

In the Participants tab:

• Include: departments, offices, teams, sub-companies, employment type (employees or contingent workers) and, depending on your reference data, employee groups. No criterion means the whole company; several values of one criterion add up; two different criteria combine.
• Exclude: with Hired after, people who joined after the chosen date (an unknown hire date does not exclude); with the Exclude employees on probation box, employees still on probation (without a probation end date, the employee is not excluded).

A live counter shows how many employees are targeted. Click Save rules. The “Cycle participants” block lists the recorded people; Resync adds newcomers and removes those holding no data. Before the launch this is not needed: launching records the population from the rules. Only active employees are included, and the population is limited to the scope of your role.

Duplicating a cycle #

The “Duplicate to another period” icon carries a cycle over, even a closed one. Choose the year and period (the next one is suggested), a name if you wish, then click Duplicate. The steps are copied with their date offsets, visibility settings and sequencing, together with the population rules. No review, participant or signature is copied: the copy starts empty, as a draft.

The dossier validation mode and the review unit are not copied: the copy reverts to “In-app validation” and “One review per person”. Check these two settings after each duplication.

Deleting a cycle #

The bin only appears on a cycle with no linked item. The cycle disappears with its steps and participant rules; this cannot be undone from the screen. A cycle that holds data is closed instead of deleted.

Good to know #

• A step’s type cannot be changed: delete the step and create it again. Its form is locked as soon as it has produced reviews, and a step that has produced reviews can no longer be deleted.
• Deleting a step that others depend on makes them start on their own date.
• As long as a step is set to “Never” for the person reviewed, the cycle cannot switch to a validation mode with a signature.
• HR staff who launch and track campaigns see the list of cycles and the Progress tab, but neither the settings blocks nor the Steps and Participants tabs. Like every Settings page, the screen also requires the “Settings — Access” permission, which by default only the administrator holds.
• A closed cycle freezes its steps and its population.