People & HR

How to run a performance review cycle as Small HR Teams

People & HRFor Small HR Teams4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're a two-person HR team running performance reviews for 150 employees, and the process eats three to four weeks every cycle. Managers ignore the kickoff email until you've sent it four times. Review forms live in Lattice or 15Five, calibration notes are scattered across a Google Doc you shared in Slack, and the final ratings never make it back into Paylocity without a manual data entry session. You're chasing 40 managers across Slack while simultaneously fielding benefits questions and running onboarding for two new hires. By the time ratings are finalized, half your notes about who said what in calibration are gone. There is no single place where you can see: who has submitted, who hasn't, what the rating distribution looks like, and what follow-up actions are outstanding.

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People & HRFor Small HR Teams4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A performance review dashboard that pulls submission status from your HRIS and surfaces the rating distribution in real time — so you can see at a glance which managers are behind without digging through Lattice exports

An automated email cadence that drafts and sends submission-deadline reminders to specific managers based on their completion status, and logs replies back to a central tracker so nothing falls through

A calibration notes hub that archives every calibration session, extracts decisions and action items by employee, and lets anyone search 'what did we decide about Sarah in the March cycle' and get an instant answer

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Project Management Email Agent Meeting Notes Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, org units, and manager relationships are always current without a manual export. Gmail is connected so the Email Agent can draft and send reminder emails from your actual inbox and log replies. Notion is connected so calibration summaries from Meeting Notes can be pushed into your existing knowledge base automatically. For any tool not covered by direct sync — like Lattice or 15Five — Starch automates it through your browser, no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a performance review cycle tracker with columns for employee name, manager, review status (not started / in progress / submitted / calibrated), rating, and any follow-up actions. Pull the employee and manager list from Paylocity. Flag anyone whose status hasn't changed in five days.

Draft a reminder email to every manager whose direct reports haven't submitted a self-review yet. Personalize each email with the manager's name and the list of their outstanding reports. Schedule it to go out Monday at 9am.

After each calibration meeting, generate a summary with decisions made, employees discussed, final ratings confirmed, and any follow-up actions. Tag each action item with an owner and due date.

Create a knowledge base section called 'Performance Review Playbook' with our review timeline, rating definitions, calibration guidelines, and FAQ for managers. Flag this page if it hasn't been updated in six months.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity to Starch so your employee roster, org structure, and manager assignments sync automatically — this becomes the source of truth for the entire cycle tracker.

2 Use Project Management to build your review cycle board: one row per employee, columns for self-review status, manager review status, calibration status, final rating, and follow-up actions. Tell Starch: 'Build me a performance review tracker seeded with all active employees and their managers from Paylocity.'

3 Connect Gmail so the Email Agent can send from your actual inbox. Draft your kickoff email template and tell Starch to personalize and send it to all people managers with their direct report list attached.

4 Set an automation: every Monday, Starch checks which managers have incomplete reviews in the tracker and drafts a personalized follow-up reminder for each. You review and send in one click, or let it send automatically after 48 hours.

5 As calibration sessions get scheduled, connect Google Calendar so Starch knows which calibration meetings are happening and when. Meeting Notes joins each session, transcribes it, and extracts rating decisions and action items by employee name.

6 After each calibration session, Starch pushes the summary into your Knowledge Management hub under the relevant review cycle folder. Any action items — 'give Marcus a development plan by April 30' — become tasks in your Project Management board.

7 At the midpoint of the cycle, pull a rating distribution report: tell Starch 'show me the distribution of current ratings by department and flag any department where more than 40% of ratings are Exceeds Expectations.' Use this ahead of calibration to prep facilitators.

8 Once calibration is complete, use the tracker to identify any employees whose final rating differs from their manager's original rating. Tell Starch to generate a change log with manager name, employee name, original rating, final rating, and reason noted in calibration.

9 Export or copy final ratings back into Paylocity. If Lattice or 15Five is your system of record for ratings, Starch automates the data entry through your browser — no API needed.

10 After the cycle closes, tell Starch to build a post-cycle summary: participation rates by department, average days to submission, rating distribution across the company, and any action items still open. Send this to your CHRO or CFO directly from Starch.

11 Archive the full cycle — all emails sent, calibration notes, rating changes, and the final distribution — in Knowledge Management under a dated folder. Next time someone asks 'what did we do differently in the March 2026 cycle,' you can find it in thirty seconds.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

March 2026 Mid-Year Review Cycle — 150 Employees, 38 Managers

Sample numbers from a real run

Employees in scope	150
People managers responsible for reviews	38
Reminder emails drafted and sent by Email Agent (3 rounds)	114
Calibration sessions logged by Meeting Notes	8
Action items extracted from calibration sessions	31
Days from kickoff to final ratings submitted	19

On March 3, the HR team kicked off the cycle by connecting Paylocity and seeding the Project Management tracker with all 150 active employees and their 38 managers. Day one, 22 managers opened the kickoff email and started their reviews. By day five, only 14 had any submitted reviews. The Email Agent drafted personalized reminders for the 24 remaining managers — each email named their specific direct reports who hadn't started — and the team sent them in one batch. Submission rate jumped from 37% to 71% within 48 hours. Eight calibration sessions ran between March 14 and March 20. Meeting Notes attended each session, and after the March 16 session covering the Engineering org, it surfaced a decision that nearly got lost: two ICs in the Platform team had their ratings walked back from 'Exceeds' to 'Meets' after a peer comparison discussion, and the facilitator's verbal note to 'follow up with their managers directly' was captured as a task assigned to the HR team with a March 22 due date. By March 22, 147 of 150 reviews were finalized. The rating distribution report flagged that the Sales org had 52% 'Exceeds Expectations' ratings before calibration; after calibration that came down to 34%. The full cycle — all 114 reminder emails, 8 calibration transcripts, 31 action items, and the final distribution — was archived in Knowledge Management under 'Performance Reviews / March 2026.' When the CFO asked two weeks later how the cycle compared to the prior one, the answer took four minutes to pull.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Review submission rate by manager and department at each milestone (day 5, day 10, day 15 of cycle)

Rating distribution by department before and after calibration — spread of Exceeds / Meets / Below across the company

Cycle duration: days from kickoff email to final ratings locked in the HRIS

Calibration action item completion rate — what percentage of follow-ups assigned in calibration were closed within 30 days

Time spent by HR on review administration per cycle (manual email sends, status chasing, data entry) as a before/after comparison

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Lattice or 15Five alone

Great for collecting reviews and running calibration inside the tool, but neither connects your email reminders, calibration notes, Paylocity roster, and action item tracking into one surface — you still manually bridge the gaps.

Google Sheets + Gmail manual process

Zero cost and full flexibility, but you're maintaining the tracker by hand, sending reminders one by one, and the calibration notes live in a Doc that nobody updates after the meeting.

Rippling or BambooHR built-in performance module

Tight HRIS integration is genuinely useful, but the review templates are rigid and there's no way to build a custom calibration tracker or automate your specific reminder cadence without paying for add-ons.

Notion + Slack manual coordination

Works fine for documentation but gives you no automation — reminders are still manual, there's no submission status tracking, and calibration notes require someone to actually take them in real time.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — project management, email agent, meeting notes all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use Lattice for performance reviews and it's not in your sync list. Can Starch still connect to it?

Yes. Lattice doesn't have a scheduled sync with Starch, but Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. You can pull submission status, export rating data, and fill in final ratings without leaving Starch. If Lattice is your source of record, it still is; Starch handles the data movement around it.

Will the email reminders come from my actual HR email address or from some generic Starch address?

From your actual inbox. Gmail connects directly to Starch, so the Email Agent drafts and sends from your real address. Managers reply to you, not to a noreply@ that nobody checks. One heads-up: the Gmail OAuth consent screen currently shows the underlying connector's name rather than Starch — that's on the roadmap to fix.

We have Paylocity. Will the employee roster stay current if someone is hired or terminated mid-cycle?

Yes. Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, org units, and status are refreshed automatically. If someone is terminated after the cycle starts, they show up as inactive in the tracker. New hires added during the cycle appear in the next sync. You're not manually updating a spreadsheet every time something changes in Paylocity.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We're asking because we'll be putting performance ratings and calibration notes into it.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing, especially given the sensitivity of performance data. We're not going to pretend otherwise. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for your security team right now, that's a real constraint and you should factor it in.

Can we use this for a full annual review cycle with 150 employees, or is it only practical for smaller teams?

150 employees is well within what this setup handles. The Paylocity sync pulls your full roster. The Project Management tracker scales to however many rows you need. The Email Agent sends batched personalized reminders without you composing 38 individual emails. The main thing to set realistic expectations about: Starch is a surface for managing and coordinating the cycle, not a replacement for the review form and rating tool you already have (Lattice, 15Five, or whatever you use). Those still do their job; Starch handles the coordination layer around them.

What happens to calibration notes from previous cycles? Can we search them later?

Yes — that's exactly what the Knowledge Management piece is for. Every calibration session gets archived in a searchable hub. If your CHRO asks in September what the rating distribution was in the March cycle, or what you decided about a specific employee in calibration, you can search for it and get a direct answer. You're not digging through a shared Google Doc or asking whoever was in the room.