Keeping notes and comments in the Employee Journal

We typically recommend that you keep performance appraisals short and do them often. Frequent and short appraisals have a number of benefits, one being that they reduce the chance of managers and employees focusing only on recent history and forgetting about important events that happened several months before. Even within short review cycles, it may be very difficult to remember everything that happened with each individual employee when the group is large. For this reason, it's important to keep track of important and key events on each employee on an ongoing basis. The Employee Journal feature allows you to do exactly that.

What is the Employee Journal?

The Employee Journal is a list of notes a manager or HR makes on an employee. Here are some of the highlights:

• The notes are never visible to the employee.
• Managers have two privacy options when creating an entry:
  • (1) HR and Managers - any HR user or the manager's manager (and so on) can view the journal note.
  • (2) Private - no one except the manager creating this note will have access to it, not even account administrators.
• The notes are linked to the employee profile. If an employee changes managers, the new manager gets access to all the notes in the journal.
• Journal entries are easily accessible when doing a performance appraisal of an employee. They are sorted by time of entry and filtered by type.

How to view the journal?

You can access the journal for all your employees on both the Appraisal and 360° Surveys pages. On those pages managers will only be able to see the employees they are responsible for. Someone with HR or Administrator privileges will be able to see all employees. To access the journal, use the "Journal" link under the employee's name.

When completing a performance appraisal or 360° feedback survey, the manager will also have access to the journal using the Journal button next to the employee's name.