Reporting on Review Data (admin)

Introduction

The PerformYard application offers several mechanisms to view the data related to reviews. In addition to these built-in lists, the Reporting & Analytics area allows one to author custom reports about a company's reviews in a self-service manner. These review reports offer a view into a company's reviews across review cycles. Conceptually, these reports build on the base capabilities offered by the All Forms List in the Reviews area of the application and provide additional flexibility to tailor the data by combining the form data with other related data from employees, reviews, and review cycles.

Creating a New Review Report

The Reporting & Analytics page allows the creation of a new report about Reviews by selecting the New Review Report button. A simple dialog will then prompt the report author for a name, an optional description, and optional tags for searching. Tagging provides a way to categorize reports for searching previously saved reports.

Name

Provide a short description or name for the report. This name will appear in the list of saved reports. Pick a name that will be descriptive for potential other administrators who may want to run the report later. For example, "2021-2022 Analysis of Completed Reviews."

Description

A longer text description of the report. This description is optional and can contain anything that might help others understand the report's purpose. For example, one might enter a description of "Analysis of completed reviews in 2022 with additional employee details sorted by highest scorers on the overall rating question."

Overview of the Report Builder

Column Picker - add and remove fields as columns to the report.
Column(s) - contains the values for the selected field across the subjects and review forms included in the report.
Column Header - displays the field name and offers the ability to sort, resize and reorder.
Edit Title - rename, update the description, and modify the tags for the report by pressing the pencil icon to the right of the report title.
Filter Panel - provides the ability to filter the included reviews for the report.
Row(s) - each row represents a review form completed by a subject (employee).
Save - saves the current state of the report, including selected columns, preferred sort ordering, column sizing and layout, and any applied filters.
Save As - makes a new report based on the current report.

Filtering

Each row of the Review report consists of the details for individual forms in a subject's review. By default, the report will include all review forms for all subjects across all reviews for a company allowing a report author to perform analysis across all review cycles. The set of review forms included in the report can be controlled using filters, for example, restricting the report to looking at reviews completed over the past year.

Filter Panel Options

Review Cycles - Filter the report data only to include review forms from the selected review cycles.
Reviews Started Between two dates - Filter the report data only to include review forms for reviews started between two dates.
Reviews Completed Between two dates - Filter the report data only to include review forms for reviews completed between two dates.
Review Forms - Filter the report data only to include specific review forms.
Employee Groups - Filter the report data only to include review forms for review subjects that are members of the selected employee groups.
Review Status - Include review forms for reviews in the selected status (Scheduled, Active, Completed.)
Review Form Status - Include review forms for reviews in the selected review form status (awaiting authors, awaiting signers, completed.)

In addition to these Quick Filter options, additional finer-grained filters can be added to the report. You can learn more about additional filters in the following article.

Choosing Columns

The report builder offers the ability to add additional related data to your report, including any related employee details for the subject of the review or information on the review cycle, for example, the cycle start date or the cycle name. In addition, you can also select data from the review, and the form, such as the list of authors and signers. A new report will start with an initial set of selected columns, including the Subject and a subset of the Form and Review columns.

Note: The following review form question types are not currently available in reporting: Instruction Questions, Multi-Select Questions, Goal Creation Questions, and Goal Discussion Questions.

Moving Columns

It is possible to change the layout of the report by dragging columns to a preferred location in the report table. For example, one may want the subject column to be the first column in the report, followed by the Subject's manager. To move columns, click a column header and drag it to the desired location in the report.

Resizing Columns

Some data is longer, and it may be preferred to change the column size to display its contents better. Columns can be resized to be smaller or larger than their default size. To resize a column, bring the mouse cursor to the edge of the column header; the cursor should change shapes and enable the column to be resized when clicked and dragged.

Sorting

A Reviews report's rows of data can be sorted on any of the selected columns.

Simple Sort

To sort a column, click on the column header for a column. The first click will choose an ascending sort, clicking a second time with reverse the sort to descending, and clicking a third time will remove the sort.

Advanced Sort

It is also possible to sort on multiple columns and choose between ascending and descending order for each. For example, one might want to sort a report by manager alphabetically and have a secondary sort on an employee score question in descending order to get a list organized by manager showing their top performers first. To sort multiple columns, press the SHIFT key on the keyboard as columns are selected for sorting.

Saving Changes

Once the report has the columns of interest selected, preferred filters applied, and any desired sort or layout changes have been chosen, the report changes can be persisted by pressing the Save button.

Exporting your Report as a CSV File

The report builder allows the download of the currently displayed report directly to a CSV file for use in your preferred spreadsheet or BI tool. The resulting CSV file will be named as a combination of the report title and today's date.

Please note that it may take a few seconds and possibly longer for larger reports for the download to appear in your browser's downloaded files list.

Additional and Advanced Topics:

A few other capabilities enabled by the Review report builder may apply to some companies.

Merging Review Questions (Question Groups)

The Column Picker panel offers the ability to combine questions that appear across disparate forms as a "Question Group." Companies implementing their review processes and cycles sometimes offer tailored review forms for different departments or employees. For example, an engineering department may tailor their review questions to engineering topics like code quality, while a sales team may ask questions related to pipeline creation. Both departments may also include a question that leads to an overall rating score that could allow for comparing employees across departments. A question group will allow treating the two separate questions, the engineering rating question and the sales rating question as if they had been a unified employee rating question for analysis across subjects.

You can find an in-depth discussion of merging review form questions using Question Groups in the following article.

Summarizing Review Form Details

The review report not only provides a detailed view of all review forms submitted about subjects but also offers the ability to summarize that data by aggregating the numeric answers to questions across forms and grouping that data on several fields, for example summarizing the form results by review subject or by subject's manager. You can find a detailed discussion on summary reports in this article.

Duplicating a Report (Save As)

One can easily create a new report based on an existing report using the Save As function. This can be useful for creating a new report similar to a previously created report so that one does not have to start from scratch, for example, creating a report for the analysis of 2019 and creating a separate but nearly identical report for analyzing 2020 results. Please note that the newly created report becomes the current report. This behavior is similar to using Save As in Word, Excel, or other productivity tools.

Complete Reference List of available Reporting Fields

You can find a full list of available data fields for reporting in the following article.

Using Excel or Google Sheets for Advanced Analysis

The Review report provides easy access to all Review related data as a single unified table and downloadable CSV export. This unified CSV removes the need to download separate review cycles as individual CSV files and employee data CSVs and should remove the need to perform extensive VLOOKUP type operations to combine data. This unified CSV file should make it much easier to perform more advanced analysis in Excel or Google Sheets. You can find an in-depth discussion of using Excel for review data analysis in the following article.