Forum Discussion
Tracking whether managers actually complete their review cycles on time
Every quarter our HR team has to chase managers who havent finished their performance reviews. Right now they literally track it in an Excel spreadsheet and send reminder emails manually. Its embarrassing honestly. We're an M365 shop and I feel like there should be a way to automate this or at least get some visibility into completion rates without it being a manual process. Whats everyone else doing?
3 Replies
We had exactly this problem. The issue isn’t really sending reminders but knowing who actually needs one without HR constantly checking spreadsheets.
You can build something in M365 with Forms/SharePoint + Power Automate. Store review status in a SharePoint list, trigger reminders based on due dates, and maybe throw a Power BI report on top for completion rates. It works, but someone still has to build and maintain the whole workflow. That might be a bit of an overengineered solution
For us, the bigger improvement was using a performance review tool that already lives in the Microsoft ecosystem. Teamflect is one option since it runs inside Teams/Outlook and actually keeps track of all that data. That said I'm sure there are others in the app store. You don't have to build every piece of automation yourself.
I’d definitely automate this either way. HR manually checking Excel every quarter and chasing individual managers is one of those processes that becomes ridiculous very quickly once the company grows.
Microsoft 365 can automate the tracking, but it needs an authoritative status source; it cannot infer that a review is complete from ordinary email. Create a restricted Microsoft List containing only operational metadata: review cycle, employee or review ID, responsible manager, due date, status, completed date, and escalation owner. Keep ratings and written review content in the HR system rather than this tracker. Use a form or controlled list update for managers to mark completion, or have the HR system update the record if it supports integration. Add list rules for important status changes and a scheduled workflow that sends reminders before the deadline, then escalates overdue records to the appropriate owner. Build saved views for due soon, overdue, and completed, and use Excel or Power BI for completion-rate trends by cycle and department. Remember that filtered views are not security boundaries; restrict the site or list permissions appropriately. Pilot one quarterly cycle and reconcile the dashboard against HR’s source records before relying on it.
Take a look at this and actually you can build a SharePoint + Power Automate workflow under M365 for reminders and dashboards.
https://ksj.lv/en/ai-performance-reviews-essential-2026-guide/
