HR: Performance Reviews and Confidential Records
Run appraisals that finish on time, with confidentiality controls that hold under audit.
HR: Performance Reviews and Confidential Records
Annual appraisals are the most-procrastinated workflow in most organisations. Forms get lost. Managers complete them in a panic the night before. Employees feel ambushed. HR spends weeks chasing.
Papyrus makes the appraisal cycle a workflow, not a project.
The appraisal workflow
Configure a single workflow template:
- Notify — Each employee + manager receives the appraisal pack 30 days before the deadline
- Self-appraisal — Employee completes a form (eForm) summarising achievements, challenges, development requests
- Manager appraisal — Manager reviews the self-appraisal, completes their own assessment, sets goals
- Discussion — Workflow pauses for the in-person discussion meeting, manager confirms it took place
- Sign-off — Both parties digitally acknowledge the final form
- HR review — HR confirms completeness, files in the employee record, schedules next cycle
Each step has an SLA. Slipped SLAs escalate to the next manager up.
The confidentiality model
Performance documents are classified Confidential. The model is:
- Employee sees their own appraisal (always)
- Direct manager sees the appraisals of their direct reports
- Skip-level manager sees aggregated data, can be granted document-level access on request
- HR Business Partner for that department sees all appraisals
- Everyone else sees nothing
Even finding a performance document via search is gated by these permissions. Restricted documents do not appear in cross-tenant searches for users without access.
What survives the org reshuffle
When someone changes manager mid-cycle, the workflow re-targets automatically (with the old manager's input preserved as a historical record). When someone is promoted, their new appraisal cycle starts in the new role; the historical record stays intact.
What HR can audit
The HR Business Partner dashboard surfaces:
- Cycle completion rate (target: 100% within deadline)
- Average cycle time per department
- Distribution of ratings (to detect manager calibration drift)
- Quality of evidence (free-text appraisals vs single-line comments)
- Repeat low-rated employees (early warning for PIP)