Performance Review Redesign Phase 3: Reviewer, Overview, Summary
Phase 3 of the Performance Review Redesign modernizes the reviewer selection, overview, and summary sections with cleaner, React-based, fully responsive interfaces. Reviewer selection gains rich user cards, enhanced internal and external reviewer workflows, bulk actions, and stronger validation, while the overview and summary sections improve process visibility and rating transparency. An enhanced GenAI writing assistant adds tone, length, and response-history controls.
What's New
- Redesigned reviewer selection section with a modern, intuitive layout supporting all reviewer types and configurable minimum-reviewer guidance.
- Enhanced internal and external reviewer search, add, and creation workflows with pagination, duplicate prevention, and rich user cards.
- Bulk reviewer selection and removal, plus single-reviewer replacement for manager and custom relationship types.
- Improved reviewer validation, eligibility handling, and skip/optional reviewer steps for off-cycle reviews.
- Redesigned overview section with a reviewer flow diagram highlighting the current step and showing sequential and parallel steps.
- Redesigned summary section with section- and step-level ratings, weights, overall rating, and an enhanced GenAI writing assistant with tone, length, and history controls.
Details
Description
Phase 3 of the Performance Review Redesign continues modernizing the review experience by rebuilding three core sections — reviewer selection, overview, and summary — with cleaner, more intuitive, React-based interfaces. The redesigned sections deliver a consistent, accessible, and fully responsive experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, helping users navigate review context, manage reviewer participation, and understand overall progress and outcomes.
The redesigned reviewer selection section supports peer, subordinate, manager, indirect manager, and custom relationship workflows with rich user cards, configurable reviewer guidance, enhanced internal and external reviewer add flows, bulk selection and removal, and stronger validation. The overview section introduces a reviewer flow diagram that highlights the current step and represents sequential and parallel steps clearly. The summary section presents section- and step-level ratings with weights and an overall rating, and adds an enhanced GenAI writing assistant with tone, length, and response-history controls.
Business Need
Organizations running performance reviews at scale need employees and managers to have a guided, intuitive experience, but legacy review sections such as reviewer selection, overview, and summary often feel outdated, inconsistent, and difficult to navigate across devices. This creates confusion during reviewer selection, makes review context harder to understand, and reduces overall efficiency throughout the review process.
By replacing legacy experiences with modern, responsive workflows, these enhancements reduce confusion, improve usability and accessibility, and create greater consistency across the review journey — without requiring changes to existing review processes. The result is a more engaging review experience that helps users manage reviewers more efficiently and complete reviews with greater confidence and clarity.
Key Features
- The reviewer selection section is redesigned with a modern, intuitive layout that supports all reviewer types and displays configurable guidance, including minimum-reviewer requirements and clear empty states.
- Internal and external reviewer search, add, and creation workflows are enhanced with dynamic search, pagination, duplicate prevention, expandable result cards, and the ability to create new external reviewers directly within the flyout.
- Users can perform bulk reviewer selection and removal using checkboxes and a select-all option, and can replace single-assignment reviewers such as manager, indirect manager, or custom relationship types via a change action.
- Reviewer validation enforces minimum requirements, prevents ineligible or duplicate reviewers, blocks re-adding reviewers who declined, and supports skipping optional reviewer steps in off-cycle reviews.
- The overview section is redesigned with structured task instructions and a reviewer flow diagram that highlights the current step and displays sequential steps vertically and parallel steps at the same level.
- The summary section presents a cleaner ratings table with section- and step-level ratings, configurable weights, a prominent overall rating, rating-scale reference, and an enhanced GenAI writing assistant offering Rewrite, Make Longer, Make Shorter, Make Simpler, Casual Tone, Professional Tone, and response-history navigation.
Deployment & Considerations
These enhancements become available with the July 2026 release, accessible during UAT on the stage environment and on production with the production release. They are available to customers using the Cornerstone Performance module. The redesigned reviewer selection, overview, and summary experiences are supported only for task central-based reviews, and customers must enable the new reviews UI experience to access them.
The enhancements are off by default and can be enabled via Admin > Performance Management > General Preferences > Performance Feature Self-Activation page. No new permissions are introduced. Customers who have already enabled the new reviews UI do not need to take any action and will see the redesigned sections by default. As part of rollout planning, organizations should familiarize admins, managers, and employees with the updated layouts and workflows to support smooth adoption.