By this point in the Academy, we've covered a lot of ground. We've looked at how to assess whether your organisation is ready for reviews, what foundations need to be in place, how to set goals, design forms, and prepare managers for the actual conversations.

You have everything you need to start.

Now comes the part where it has to actually happen. Running one review conversation isn't a big challenge. The situation looks entirely different when you're coordinating fifteen or thirty conversations, happening in parallel across different teams, and you want to come out the other end with conclusions that are useful for the whole company.

This module is about how to plan and run a full review cycle – in a way that actually supports how your company grows.

Does timing matter?

Yes. More than most companies assume.

In practice, many organisations run reviews at year-end. That's fine if it's a deliberate decision based on the company's business cycle. It's less useful if it's simply because that's what everyone else does.

Think through two factors when deciding when to run reviews.

Business rhythm and decision-making windows

Reviews should be tied to the company's business cycle, not an arbitrary date in the calendar. What matters is when the organisation makes decisions about budgets, pay rises, promotions, and team changes.

Reviews should happen before those decisions. That gives you a current, accurate picture of performance and capability when it counts. If reviews happen after the fact, they lose their main purpose: giving you the data to make informed personnel decisions.

Availability and real conditions for conversation

Once you've found a sensible business window, think about whether people actually have the headspace for it.

"Everyone here is always busy." I know. That's the default in every company. The point isn't to find a perfect moment – because it doesn't exist. It's to consciously create one.

Instead of asking "when do we have time?", ask: "When do we have the least operational pressure?" Look at natural gaps – between projects, after delivering a major milestone, after a month or quarter closes.

Then ask: can we block out two to three weeks for this process in advance? Can we put it in calendars early and communicate clearly that this is a priority? If you don't do that, reviews will always lose out to the live project, the urgent client, the deadline that's already here.

Performance reviews don't need a perfect moment. They need a deliberate decision to create one.

How to plan the schedule, step by step

Here's how to structure a full review cycle for an organisation of around 50 people. Smaller or larger organisations can adapt the same principles.

Step 1: Decide how often

For a company of this size, especially in tech or a fast-growth environment: twice a year, every six months.

More frequently, and goals often haven't had time to be delivered. The administrative overhead outweighs the value. Less frequently, and goals go stale before the review happens, which is where the chaos starts.

For larger companies with more specialised departments in less dynamic industries, once a year tends to work well.

Step 2: Plan the cycle

Here's a six-week schedule that works in practice:

• Week 1 – Company-wide communication: what's happening, why, and when. A brief reminder of the evaluation criteria. Short guidance for both managers and their teams.
• Week 2 – Employees complete their self-assessments.
• Week 3 – Managers prepare their evaluations.
• Weeks 4–5 – Participants have the opportunity to review the assessment before the meeting. Review conversations take place. Conclusions and goals are agreed together.
• Week 6 – Manager calibration session: shared conclusions, alignment across teams. First follow-up actions agreed where needed. Recurring check-in cadence set for the period between reviews.

Step 3: Plan the conversations themselves

The key word here is "plan" – actually book these, in advance. One of the most common failure modes is leaving the scheduling open, which leads to disorganisation, delays, and losing the window for decisions when they actually need to be made.

A few rules that make a real difference:

• One manager should have a maximum of 8 to 10 review conversations. Beyond that, either the quality drops or the conversations spread over too many weeks to be useful.
• No more than one or two conversations per day per manager. More than that and it becomes hard to do them well alongside regular work.
• Leave at least 30 minutes between conversations. That's the time to write up conclusions and prepare for the next one. Without it, conversations start blurring into each other and important details get lost.
• All conversations should be in calendars well in advance. This ensures the process is treated as a real priority, not something that gets bumped whenever something urgent comes up.
• Spread the conversations over time rather than compressing them all into one week. Fatigue sets in quickly when reviews are stacked, and the quality drops noticeably by the end.

To close

When you schedule reviews matters. It should support business decisions, not disrupt the organisation. There's no such thing as the "perfect time" – you have to create it deliberately and protect it. The whole cycle needs to be mapped out and in the calendar, from communication through to follow-up actions. And good scheduling directly affects the quality of the conversations themselves.