Summarizing Review Report (admin)

Introduction

PerformYard Review Reports offer great flexibility to look at all your review-related information in one unified report.  These reports can include data from any review form across multiple review cycles and can include any employee-related fields.  This data can then be sorted, filtered, and exported to your preferred spreadsheet for further analysis.  Summary reporting offers the ability to perform additional analysis on review reports directly in the PerformYard application without exporting the data to a spreadsheet. You can learn more about creating new Review Reports in this article.  

Summarizing a Review Report

The review report builder offers a Summarize Rows panel, found below the Select Columns panel, to summarize the data contained in the review report. From this panel, you can select one or more fields to summarize the form data, toggle between detailed and summary views, and control additional options for the summary report.

There are two core concepts to a summary review report:

  • Summarize-By Fields, representing the grouping of the data to be shown in a summary report, and 
  • Summary Functions that define the aggregation that should be applied to the columns in the selected grouping.

Core Concepts of a Summary Report

Summarize-By Fields

Summary review reports allow for up to 4 levels of grouping or subgrouping, for example summarizing the report by review subject, by manager and review subject, or potentially by region, department, manager, and review subject.  You might choose to summarize by Review Subject and calculate the average rating score across all forms received for each review subject to help identify employees that might be considered for promotion, for example.  

You can change the ordering of the summarize-by fields by dragging them up or down within the list of summarize-by fields. The table will automatically update itself to reflect the change. You can also easily remove or add additional Summarize-By Fields.    

Summary Functions

You can summarize the answers to numeric questions (or other numeric fields) using common aggregations, for example, taking the average of the answers to a question across all forms for a subject. 

These summary functions summarize the results across all matching review forms. For example, if summarizing by the department only, then the summary will be the average of all the forms for employee review subjects from that department.  If some employees in a department have more forms than others, then that department's average will be skewed toward the information contributed by those employees. You'll often want to include the Review Subject field as part of your Summarize-By fields to ensure a per-employee summary. 

Toggling Detailed and Summary Views

You can easily switch between the summary view and detailed view of the Review Report using the Summarize Rows toggle that appears once you have selected at least one Summarize-By field.  The Summarize-By field selections will be remembered when you toggle to the detailed view.

Showing All Report Columns

Review reports can include any number of fields, but not all columns are necessarily summarizable when switching to a summary view.  Typically a summary report will be created to summarize numerical results, so any text-type columns may not make as much sense for a summary report.  By default, such columns will be included in the report and display a form count as their summary.  However, it is possible to automatically hide such columns when viewing the report as a summary report by toggling off the "Show All Columns" toggling on the summarize rows panel.   

The report builder will attempt to keep any included text columns that show relevant information directly related to the summarize-by columns. For example, it will not hide employee fields when summarizing by review subject or not hide review cycle fields when summarizing by review cycle name.

Download to CSV

Review reports can be exported to CSV in either their detailed view or summary view for further analysis in your preferred spreadsheet or business intelligence tool.  While summary reports provide a good deal of functionality around analyzing reviews, there may be some scenarios where more advanced analysis is empowered by combining the reporting capabilities of PerformYard with the more advanced analytic capabilities of modern spreadsheets and BI tools.  For example, a company might wish to normalize or calibrate the ratings for certain managers by looking at the distribution of employee ratings for each manager and then applying a formula in Excel or a similar tool to normalize those distributions.


Examples

Scenario: Stack Ranking All Employees

A review cycle includes a form that captures an overall rating for an employee, and the company would like to see a summary for each employee that is the average across all forms for that employee.  Additionally, to surface their top performers, the company would like to sort the report on the overall rating value in descending order to have top performers shown first in the table.

Summarize-By Field(s) Review Subject
Summary Function Average on an Overall Rating Question
Sort(s) Descending on an Overall Rating Question

Suppose your company uses distinct review cycles and forms for each department. In that case, the question grouping functionality in reporting can be used to unify these questions from different forms into a singular question for summarization. You can learn more about question grouping in this article.

Scenario: Ranking a Manager's Employees

A company is interested in providing individual managers with the ranked results for their direct reports from the latest review cycle.  In addition, the HR administrator wants to leverage this information to notice if specific teams appear to have significantly different approaches to scoring their team members by looking at the range of values team members on the managers' team received.

Summarize-By Field(s) Employee Manager, Review Subject
Summary Function Average on an Overall Rating Question
Sort(s) Primary Sort: Ascending on the Manager column to list managers alphabetically
Secondary Sort: Descending on the Overall Rating Question column to list the Managers' employees with the highest scores first.

You can sort multiple columns using the SHIFT key as you click individual columns.

Scenario: Reviewing Summarized 360 Feedback 

A company leverages 360 feedback as part of its review process and would like to summarize the results of the various 360 forms into a single overall rating for each employee and get a general idea of the number of 360 forms submitted for each employee.

Filters Review Cycle filter matching the review cycles to include in the report.
Review Forms filter matching only 360 Form(s)
Summarize-By Field(s) Review Subject
Summary Function Average on the 360 Form Rating Question
Count on a different question (to get the form count)
Sort(s) Optionally, Descending on the 360 Form Rating Question

You can also add additional Summarize-By fields to organize the report by managers or by departments.

Additional Topics

Reference of Supported Summarize By Fields

You can find the current list of supported Summarize-By fields in the following article.  

Reference of Supported Aggregation Functions

You can find the current list of supported aggregation and summary functions in the following article.