Performance Reviews: structured, scored 1-on-1s

What Performance Reviews is

Performance Reviews is a launchpad deck: a guided flow that takes you from "I need to run a 1-on-1" to a scored, signed, shareable record in about fifteen minutes. It walks a manager through a fixed set of rating questions and open-text prompts about one team member, captures a sign-off, and closes with a pass or fail read against a fixed bar so the review means something beyond a friendly chat.

This is a genuine manual action, not a data-detection feature. Verinode does not read your team's performance from other data sources and fill this in for you. You open it, you run it, you sign it. What Verinode does is give the review a consistent shape (the same five dimensions every time), score it the same way every time, and turn it into a PDF you can hand to the team member or file for the record.

Where to find it

Open Team from the sidebar (/team). In the Take Action row you'll see a tile labeled Performance Reviews with the subtitle "Structured 1-on-1s with your team," sitting alongside the team's other launchpad tiles (DISC, Training Plan, Skill Matrix, Career Path). It carries a small pulsing Live badge in its top corner, the same treatment every launchpad tile in the row uses. Clicking it opens the deck as a center overlay; your sidebar and the IQ panel stay in place behind it.

The deck has three tabs across the top: Overview, In progress, and Start a review.

Overview tab

This is the orientation tab, the same three-part shape every launchpad deck uses:

What this is for. "Run a structured review in 15 minutes." Underneath: "Keep your best people. Five rating dimensions, a sign-off, a shareable PDF."

What you'll get. A worked example of a completed review, so you can see the shape of the output before you run one:

• Overall score: 84%, with the note "Above your 70% pass bar."
• Three of the five rating rows shown as bars: Quality of work 4.5/5, Reliability 4.0/5, Communication 3.5/5.
• A caption underneath: "Example review. Each completed review saves a shareable PDF."

This is a fixture, not your data. It exists to show you what a finished scorecard looks like before you've run your first one.

Your reviews once you start. Until you've run a review, this section shows two placeholder rows: "Reviews in progress, ready to resume" and "Completed reviews with their PDFs." Once you start one, it stops being a placeholder, see the In progress tab below.

In progress tab

Every review you've started but haven't finished lands here. The tab label carries a count badge showing how many are open.

Each row shows the team member's name (or the review's title, if no name was captured) on the left and a Resume link on the right. Clicking a row takes you straight back into the run form, wherever you left off, thanks to autosave (see below). There's no separate "delete" or "cancel" control here; an in-progress review simply sits here until you finish it.

If you have none open, the tab has nothing to show and the count badge doesn't appear.

Start a review tab

This is where a review actually begins. It shows a picker of review templates, each as a row:

• A radio dot on the left (copper when selected).
• The template name.
• Estimated minutes to complete, right-aligned (e.g. "15 min").
• A one-line description underneath.

Today there's one built-in template, 1-on-1 Performance Review: "Quarterly review of a team member. Five rating dimensions, structured strengths/gaps, signed sign-off, ready to share." Estimated at 15 minutes.

Above the picker: "Pick a review to run. The form walks you through every section, captures a sign-off, and produces a PDF you can share."

Select a template and click Start the review. That materializes a real, running review and takes you to the run form. If review templates fail to load for some reason, the tab reads: "Review templates ship with the product. None are cataloged right now."

The Performance Reviews tile's primary action (clicking the tile itself, or its CTA) opens the deck directly onto this tab, so you can skip Overview and go straight to starting one.

Running the review: the five sections

The 1-on-1 Performance Review template has fifteen questions across five sections. You (the manager) answer every one about the team member being reviewed, not the team member themselves, this is a manager's assessment, filled in by the manager.

1. Subject + period. Three short-text fields: "Team member being reviewed," "Review period (e.g. Q1 2026)," and "Their role." These frame who and when.

2. Performance ratings. Five 1-to-5 star-style ratings, this is the pass-bar scorecard:

• Quality of work, "Rare rework, attention to detail, finished product."
• Reliability and ownership, "Follow-through, hits commitments, raises blockers early."
• Communication, "Clear updates, listens, escalates the right items."
• Customer / carrier experience, "Ratings, complaints, walkthrough sign-offs."
• Team contribution, "Helps peers, mentors juniors, raises the room."

Each rating renders as five numbered buttons (1 through 5), with a caption underneath reading "1 = Poor · 5 = Excellent." These five ratings are the only inputs that feed the score, everything else on the form is narrative or forward-looking context that doesn't move the number.

3. Strengths and gaps. Three open-text prompts: "What they're doing well, give two specific examples," "Where they need to grow, give two specific examples," and "Coaching commitment for the next period" (with the help text "What you'll do to help them, not what they'll do.", this one is about your commitment, not theirs).

4. Forward look. Two forced-choice questions rendered as button chips instead of stars: "Discuss compensation in this period?" (Yes / Not yet / Already done) and "On track for next role / certification?" (Yes / Not yet / Off track). Plus one optional text field: "One thing they want from you (their words)."

5. Sign-off. A signature field labeled "Manager." Type your full name; once it's captured, the form shows it back to you with a timestamp, e.g. "Manager: Jordan Vance · Jul 13, 2026, 2:41 PM."

Required fields are marked with a small red asterisk next to the question number. The setup fields, the five ratings, the two strengths/gaps prompts, the two forward-look choices, and the signature are all required; the coaching-commitment field, "One thing they want from you," and both action-item-style prompts are optional.

While you're filling it in

At the bottom of the form, a sticky bar tracks your progress: "N of 15 answered," with a thin copper progress bar underneath that fills as you go. Your answers autosave every ten seconds while you're actively editing (only when something has actually changed, it doesn't fire on an untouched form), and once a save lands, the bar shows "Saved [time]" next to the progress line. That's what makes the In progress tab's Resume link meaningful: close the tab mid-review and it picks back up where you left off.

If you try to submit with a required question unanswered, the form stops you: "Answer required for N question(s) before submitting." If the signature is missing, it's more specific: "Sign the form before submitting." Fix what's flagged and submit again.

What "pass bar" means here

The review's score comes from the five Performance ratings questions only. Verinode averages your five 1-to-5 ratings, converts that average to a percentage (a 3.5-out-of-5 average becomes 70%), and rounds it. The pass bar for this template is fixed at 70%, equivalent to an average rating of 3.5 out of 5 across the five dimensions.

This is a template-level configuration, not something you set per review. It's not benchmarked against other operators or other companies; it's an internal bar built into the review itself, the same threshold every time you run this template, so a review from this quarter is comparable to one from last quarter.

After you submit: the scored summary

Once you submit, the review closes and the tab shows a scored summary in place of the form:

• A green "Audit complete" label at the top.
• Your overall score, e.g. "84%," shown large.
• Next to it: "Target 70% · Passed" (in green) or "Target 70% · Below target" (in red), depending on whether your average cleared the bar.
• The completion date and time, right-aligned.
• An Export PDF button, with the note "Branded with your company name and signature" beside it.

Below that, every question you answered is listed again in read-only form, grouped by the same five sections, so the whole review is visible on one page: ratings show as "4 / 5," forced choices show the option you picked, text answers show what you wrote, and the signature shows the name and the date it was signed. Anything left blank (an optional field you skipped) reads "Not answered."

Once a review is closed this way, it moves off the In progress tab (its slot in that count disappears) and the "completed reviews" placeholder on the Overview tab is what it graduates into.

The shareable PDF

Clicking Export PDF renders a real PDF, on the fly, and downloads it. It carries:

• Your company's logo if you've uploaded one in your profile, or a Verinode wordmark header if you haven't (with your company name printed in the meta line underneath so the record is still clearly attributed to you).
• The review title, a "Self-audit" tag (the same internal label the platform uses for any review or audit you run on yourself/your team, rather than send to an outside respondent), the completion date, and "Run by [your name]."
• A pass-rate line reading, for example, "84% completed · target 70% · passed" (or "· below target").
• The full question-by-question record, grouped by section, exactly as it appears in the on-screen summary.
• The manager's signature and the date it was captured.

This PDF is also cached, so re-downloading it later doesn't require re-rendering. Hand it to the team member in the review conversation, attach it to their file, or keep it for your own record of the quarter's assessment.

How this differs from the Performance tile on Team

The Performance metric tile you'll see elsewhere in the Team section (and its own Team performance view) is a different thing: it's peer-relative signal detection reading single-point-of-failure risk across your whole roster from the data already flowing in. This deck is the opposite kind of tool, a manual, structured conversation you run with one person, scored against a fixed internal bar, not against peers. Completed reviews here also feed the coaching history you'll find on a member's own coaching and review history panel.

Related reading

• Team performance: peer-relative dimensions, not a single score
• Coaching and review history on a member
• The Team section: your crew, depth, and capacity at a glance
• Members: your roster, filters, and card/table views
• The decision workspace
• Forwarding documents
• Connecting your data

Data sources