Reporting Visualizations
Introduction
PerformYard empowers users with a self-service report builder experience, giving them complete control to select and combine different data across review forms, reviews, cycles, and employee data fields. This data can then be further filtered and summarized. Reporting visualizations offer a variety of charts and a tabular view, allowing users to view the summarized data in a way that suits their needs.
Visualizing your performance review data is straightforward and can be broken down into three simple steps: Select Data, Summarize, and Visualize.
Select Data
The 'Select Columns' panel in the review reporting section is a powerful tool that allows you to select the specific review level and employee data you want to include in your report. You can create a unified report that meets your needs by selecting the appropriate columns.
In addition to the ability to select columns of data across review forms, reviews, review cycles, and employee details you can refine the set of data by applying filters to the underlying review data, for example focusing on those forms that occurred in a particular review cycle or for a specific department.
Note: Combining or merging questions from different forms is particularly helpful when visualizing review data. You can leverage the ability to define Question Groups to organize your data in a way that will facilitate the charts you would like to create. You can learn more about question groups here.
Summarize
The 'Summarize Rows' panel allows you to group and summarize your review performance data and aggregate the results with standard functions like average, sum, count, min, and max. Summary reporting allows users to perform additional analysis on review data directly in the PerformYard application without exporting the data to a spreadsheet. You can learn more about summarizing performance review data here. For example, you could summarize the answers to a specific question across all forms in a review cycle for each review subject to get an overall average score for the question.
Visualize
By default, summary reports are displayed in tabular form within a flexible grid that allows for moving columns, sorting columns, and changing the applied aggregate function to numeric columns. The 'Visualize' panel allows viewing this summary data using various visualizations (charts). You can learn more about PerformYard reporting support for visualizing data.
Visualizing a Summary Review Report
As described above and shown below, creating a reporting visualization consists of three steps, achieved via the panels on the right side of a review report. The Visualize panel will appear once a review report is summarized, rendering visualizations about summary data.
Visualize Panel
The visualize panel is made up of two sections:
- Chart Gallery: The collection of available visualizations. The chart gallery recommends (enables) those compatible with the currently selected summary reporting data. See the table below for more details.
- Chart Settings: Controls that affect the chart's content and display, including the grouping and subset of data that should be shown and, for some charts, offer chart-specific settings to control axes.
Chart Gallery
The chart gallery will offer visualizations compatible with the data in your summary report. For instance, a Scatter chart requires two metrics (numeric columns). If your summary report only contains one metric, the scatter chart will not be available in the chart gallery. The popular 9-box visualization is designed to visualize the results for employees, managers, and employee groups. This chart is only available if the summary report is summarized by one of those fields.
Available Charts:
| Chart | Description | Requirements for Metrics and Data Series | |
 |
Table | This is the default view for reporting data and summarized reports, supporting multiple levels of grouping, sorting, and moving columns. |
|
 |
Bar Chart | A bar chart compares employees, managers, or other groupings across one metric. It is helpful in generating a Top 25 chart, for example. |
|
 |
Column Chart | A column chart compares employees, managers, or other groupings across one metric like a bar chart. It is helpful in generating a Top or Bottom 10 chart. |
|
 |
Scatter Chart | A scatter chart compares employees, managers, or other groupings of reviews across two metrics. |
|
 |
9-Box Chart | A 9-Box chart is a standard HR visualization that compares employees, managers, or groups on Performance and Potential metrics. |
|
 |
Distribution Chart (Coming Soon) |
A distribution chart (also known as a histogram) shows the distribution of values across one metric. It is helpful to visualize the frequency of specific ranges of scores, for example, to examine potential skewing scores to particular questions (easy graders, harsh graders, etc.). |
|
Please note: Additional charts will be added over time. Please get in touch with the customer success team with suggestions for additional visualizations you'd like to see incorporated into reporting.
Chart Settings
Each chart can be tailored to control the information it displays, including the number of and specific groupings of data that should be shown and settings to control the axes of particular charts.
Data Series
The data series represents the "main subject" of the chart, specifically the grouping (summarized by field) for the data displayed in the chart. For example, if you wanted to create a Top 10 bar chart (stack ranked chart) of review subjects based on their average score for a question across their various review forms, the review subject would be the Data Series for the chart. The options available for Data Series will map 1:1 with the summary panel's list of summarize by fields. For some charts, specifically the 9-Box chart, the Data Series will only allow specific fields to be chosen, namely Review Subject, Employee Group, or Manager.
Interaction between the Summarize Panel options and a Chart's Data Series.
Currently, visualizations support rendering one grouping level, while the summary table will support summarizing a table on up to four grouping levels. The Data Series setting allows you to indicate which grouping should be used for charting the summary data. For most charts, the Data Series will default to the last summarized-by selection on the Summarize panel. That default can vary based on the type of selected visualization.
Metric
The Metric or Metrics for a chart represent the measurement to be displayed in the visualization. For most charts, a single metric is sufficient to render the chart, as in the example above, which could be the aggregation of a numeric answer to a specific question across all the forms for a given review subject. Some charts, namely the Scatter and the 9-Box chart, require two metrics to render the chart. In the case of the 9-box chart, one metric is meant to represent employee performance, and the other is intended to represent employee potential.
Range
Visualizations are typically used to highlight insights about a subset of employees or to display an overall summary for sets of employee populations. Charts can become illegible or nonsensical when they display too many items. The Range setting allows for more specificity on the subset of items the chart should display, for example, displaying the employees in the Top 10 or the Bottom 25 for a given metric. A tabular report is typically best suited for results with many items.
Please note: The scatter and 9-box charts also offer a Top and Bottom range option; as these charts rely on two metrics, top and bottom filtering is based on a primary sort of the first metric with a secondary sort on the second selected metric.
Minimum
PerformYard will attempt to infer the range of values for the selected metric but can only do so based on the underlying data of the report results, which may only encompass a subset of the potential valid values. The Minimum and Maximum settings allow you to specify or override the inferred minimum and maximum values as needed to reflect the possible range of values for specific charts' X and Y axes.
Maximum
PerformYard will attempt to infer the range of values for the selected metric but can only do so based on the underlying data of the report results, which may only encompass some of the potential valid values. The Minimum and Maximum settings allow you to specify or override the inferred minimum and maximum values as needed to reflect the possible range of values for specific charts' X and Y axes.
Downloading Charts as Images
Charts can be easily downloaded as an image to include in an email or presentation.
Downloaded Chart Legend
Downloaded charts include a legend describing the chart settings that were applied to them when they were downloaded as images.
Additional Examples
Example: Stack Ranked Employees on a Performance Rating
In this scenario, employees were rated using a numeric score for a Performance rating question. This question was made available across several different forms; one form was made available to managers and contributors, and a couple of forms were made available as 360 peer feedback forms. The performance ratings can be unified using a question group and then summarized by review subject. Once summarized as desired, the visualization panel offers a Bar chart with an option to display the "Top 5" review subjects. The same chart can also be narrowed down to the Bottom 10 or 25 scoring review subjects.
Example: 9-Box of Managers' Average Team Performance Ratings
In this scenario, an HR Administrator wants to understand better how different teams are performing relative to each other initially based on a roll-up by each manager and then narrowing it down to individual employees filtered for a given manager. The underlying review forms had questions related to performance and potential, and they were unified from the different forms using question groups.
