Using AI to prep managers before performance reviews. What are you doing?

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We're seeing the same challenge in many organisations. Summarising Teams chats and emails can provide useful context, but it rarely gives managers the full picture because performance conversations should be grounded in goals, outcomes, feedback, development progress, and documented achievements, not just activity.

The most effective approach I've seen is using AI to aggregate information from multiple sources rather than relying on communications alone. This might include performance goals, manager and peer feedback, one-on-one notes, project contributions, learning records, recognition, action items, and relevant collaboration data. AI can then help managers identify themes, accomplishments, challenges, and growth areas while keeping the employee's actual objectives at the centre of the review.

One lesson we've learned is that managers should not wait until review season to gather evidence. Encouraging employees and managers to capture wins, feedback, and key outcomes throughout the year creates much better inputs for AI-generated summaries and leads to fairer, more balanced reviews.

I'm curious what others are using. Are you relying on your performance management platform, a dedicated AI HR solution, or building something with Microsoft 365 Copilot and your existing systems?

CandyMullany​ - I just sat through a MS Learn session about CoPIlot Adoption and they talked about exactly this. There are three things you can access. (1) CoPilot Analytics Dashboard - you will find this in your Admin Center under CoPilot - (2) Viva Insights (Agent 365) requires VIVA (but is now available for free as part of CoPilot license), (3) A set of M365 CoPilot Adoption Reports that are provided as PowerBI Templates that you would have to use and build in your org. I have seen the CoPilot dashboards and Agent dashboards, but know nothing about the Power BI Template reports. Just heard this today from Michael and Lily from MS teams - someone here may have more context. These resources are available at this link:

https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/ 

Hope this helps.  Good luck. 

Well there are different ways to go about this but I honestly don't think this is what Copilot is actually for. Performance reviews and management overall is too complex a process with too much riding on it that trusting a tool not specialized in it isn't worth the effort.

If you really want to harness AI for this process, there are plenty of strong HR/performance review software in the Microsoft app store with very strong AI features. While I am not the biggest AI person, I know for a fact that Teamflect, the tool we currently use for performance reviews, has an AI assistant built in that can analyze performance data, goals, etc, and can help managers and employees prepare for meetings. 

I've heard great things about it internally and have experimented with it myself. I can strongly recommend you give it a try.