This article was written by Samantha Barrell, a Digital Services Manager and daily Igloo user. 

We moved our appraisal process onto our community this year, and it has worked really well. Even sceptical managers came back to me with really positive feedback. However, the initial setup took quite a while - we have 150 employees and it took me nearly a day. Now that it is all setup though, adding new employees as they start is only a two minute job.

Our old system was paper based and resulted in managers spending large amounts of time writing up the appraisal forms after the meetings. It also meant that HR had to scan and file forms.

For our appraisals this year we used moderated wikis, and also read tracking and tasks. This is how I set them up;

• Each of our different teams have a team space within our community. I added a new page to each space called Appraisals.
• I then added a new Wiki channel for each member of staff in the team, which I nested under the Appraisals page like this;

• We used the channel template feature to add our appraisal form (which we did as a table). We also set read tracking on for the whole channel (this applied a 'I agree to the contents of this appraisal document' button to each published wiki) and also moderation - the moderator was set to the employees line manager.

• We then set appropriate access levels - so the employee and moderator had full access to the channel, but other members of the team had no access (to keep the process private). We gave HR full access to all of the Wiki channels.

• On the appraisals page, I added a channel widget to display the wiki channels I had created.

Once this was all setup, the actual appraisal process was fairly straight forward.

1. The employee navigated to their team space, went to the Appraisals page and clicked on their name.
2. They then added a new article to their wiki channel. The channel template was applied by default, so they just filled in their details and answered the questions. They could save it as a draft if they wanted to do it a bit at a time.
3. When the employee was ready, they sent the article to the moderator (line manager) who then approved the article.
4. During the appraisal meeting, the manager edited the article to add any notes, agreed KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), training plans, etc.
5. After the appraisal meeting, both the employee and appraisal manager clicked on the 'I agree to the contents of this appraisal form' button that was applied automatically to the bottom of the article.
6. We then used the tasks at the bottom of the article to set reminders for the 3, 6 and 9 month reviews.

Now it is all setup, future appraisals can just be added as new articles in the employee's channel.

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