Note: You must have Form designer access to build and edit forms.

This includes basic and advanced guidance on building and editing forms within Form design.

Building and editing review Form templates (basic)

The basics of Form Design:

Important notes about changing your forms
The form designer screen
Creating/editing form sections
Copying a section from another form in your library
What do [[[ and ]]] mean?
Creating/editing questions on your form
Formatting the question text
Saving your form

Important notes about changing forms

To edit your forms, or add new ones, head to Administration Centre > Form design. You'll see a list of your forms there. Click one to edit it.

Any changes you make will be reflected immediately in any reviews using the form in the future, now and the past. Even closed reviews will be affected by changes you make to the form that those reviews used.

So, when editing a form, you have the choice to save it as a new form or to save over the existing form. How do you decide?

You're safe to overwrite the existing form in the following scenarios:

You haven't launched Talos Perform yet, or no-one is already using this form for their review
You're just making slight adjustments to the spelling or wording of competencies.
You're just adding new questions and sections
You're just re-ordering questions and sections
You're changing questions to be Rating + Text questions from just Text questions

Do not overwrite the existing form in any of the following scenarios. Instead, save your changes as a new form.

You're making meaningful changes to the text, eg changing "Teamwork" to "Leadership". This would cause old review reports to change their meaning too.
You're removing questions or sections.
If you want to create a variation for a different group of people in your organisation.

Form designer screen

The sections in your form are shown on the left, with the individual questions in that section shown on the right.

Click on any section on the left to show the questions within it.

Creating/editing form sections

On the left you'll see the sections in your form:

Click on a section title to edit the title. Don't worry about the subtitle text, this isn't visible anywhere except here in Form Design.

Click on the surrounding area to load the section's questions in the right hand panel.

If you hover your cursor over a section, additional options will appear:

The trash bin button will delete this section from your form.
You can drag this section up and down using the up-down arrow button.
The two sheets of paper icon will copy the section to the bottom of the form if you want to duplicate it and then you can drag it into place.

Copying a section from another form in your library

If you're creating several variations of a form, you may find you want to grab a section from another form and bring it into the one you're editing. Do this as follows:

Click Add a new section here

You'll see the section selector popup:

Use the drop down box to select the form you want to copy a section from.
Once you do this, the list of sections in the that form will appear. Click Add next to any section you wish to add it to your new form.
Click Ok to dismiss this window. The new section has been added and you can now save your new form.

What do [[[ and ]]] mean?

These are used to translate your form into different languages. If you're not going to use Talos Perform in any other language, you can safely remove the [[[ and ]]] symbols, i.e. replace [[[Competencies]]] with Competencies.

Creating/editing questions on your form

The drop-down menu enables you to choose which type of section you want, eg. a text box and rating, or a rating only, or an overview of objectives. See below for more details on these options.

Your forms can be a mixture of any question type you like. Each question in a section has a 'type' which is one of the following. Some are obvious questions, others are more like placeholders for functionality that may or may not be available to the user:

There are also summary questions that appear at the bottom of the page in the grey section. These are used by the line manager to make an overall comment on the review discussion and to set final ratings.

For each question, you can define the following:

Title - click the title to edit it.
Additional notes - click them to edit the text. You can use this to add behavioural competencies and other instructions to the reviewee and line manager.
Question type - select the question type such as rating only, rating + text, text-only from a drop-down menu above the question.
Objective type - you can pull in the reviewee's objectives and PDPs into their review by selecting objective question types.
Custom rating scale - you can customise your rating scale in Configuration > Forms which will then pull through into your forms. You can also edit the rating scale on the form directly if you want to use a specific one for an individual question.
Use the duplicate button to create a new copy of a question you've already typed in.
You can also use the trash bin button to deactivate a question or the up-down arrow button to reorder questions.

Formatting the question text

You'll need to use HTML to add bold/underline/italic text:

This is bold text

This is underlined text

This is italic text

You can also use HTML to include bullet point or numbered lists:

<ul>
<li>Bullet text</li>
<li>Bullet text</li>
<li>Bullet text</li>
</ul>

<ol>

</ol>

Saving your form

At the bottom of the page are the options to save your form.

Click Save this form to overwrite the same form. You can also rename a form by changing the name and clicking Save this form.

If you decide to save this as a new form, type in a new name for it in the box. You'll create a new form that can be used in subsequent reviews.

If you click Discard changes, you'll return to the form list and any changes you've made to this form will not be saved.

Building and editing review Form templates (advanced)

Note: You must have Form designer access to build and edit forms.

The advanced Form Design:

Mandatory review questions
The visibility of sections and questions
Who can input answers to the questions?
Merge terms
Saving your form

Mandatory review questions

You can make certain questions mandatory in reviews - you can choose to make the rating or the comments mandatory, or both. Doing so will stop someone progressing the review to the next stage in the workflow if they haven't answered all the required questions.

You'll see these options beneath each question and you can select the combination you need depending on which component you'd like to be mandatory and for which role.

The visibility of the sections and questions

There are four options for the visibility of your form sections:

Appraisee and manager
Appraisee, manager and feedback-givers
Manager and feedback-givers
Manager (this can be used for private notes that aren't seen by the Appraisee)

You can combine them however you want. Click on the grey visibility buttons to select from the dropdown options.

The ones that will be hidden from the employee (options 3 and 4) change colour so you can easily tell which sections are which. Whether option 3 is hidden from the employee depends on your feedback settings in Configuration.

If you select options 3 (and have feedback hidden from the employee in Configuration) or 4, they will be marked in the review with a padlock next to them to let the manager know they are hidden from the employee. The manager will also be able to hide these confidential sections from view by toggling the Hide sensitive data button.

Who can input answers to the questions?

Once you've determined who should see each section of your form, you can decide who should be able to input comments/ratings to each question.

There are six input options for each question:

Employee, manager and feedback-givers
Employee and manager
Employee
Managers and feedback-givers
Managers (hidden from employee)

Second sign-off

The second drop-down allows you to determine whether the second sign-off (if you're using this feature) can input comments too.

The third drop-down determines whether the question is a summary question.

Summary questions can only be answered during the sign-off stages of your workflow.

For example, if you're using the regular 3-stage workflow, the manager can complete summary questions when the review is at stage 2. If you're using the employee sign-off workflow, the employee will be able to complete summary questions during the sign-off stage. If you have multiple sign-off stages, all those involved will have the options to answer summary questions at their sign-off stage.

Form merge terms

You may wish to pull in your custom people data to your forms to make the experience more personalised for your employees. Common ones you may like to use are {appraisee} and {appraiser} which will insert their names into the question rather than having to refer to them as employee and manager. Here is a full list of merge terms you can use (this is dependent on what custom data you have on your account):

{appraisee}
{appraiseefullname}
{appraiser}
{appraiserfullname}
{secondmanager}
{secondsignoff}
{ddueday}
{dduemonth}
{ddueyear}
{appraiseeuserid}
{appraiseeemployeeid}
{appraiseecustom1}
{appraiseecustom2}
{appraiseecustom3}
{appraiseecustom4}
{appraiseecustom5}
{appraiseecustom6}
{appraiseeposition}
{appraiseecustomdatetime1}
{appraiseecustomdatetime2}

Saving your form

At the bottom of the page are the options to save your form.

Click Save this form to overwrite the same form. You can also rename a form by changing the name and clicking Save this form.

If you decide to save this as a new form, type in a new name for it in the box. You'll create a new form that can be used in subsequent reviews.

If you click Discard changes, you'll return to the form list and any changes you've made to this form will not be saved.

Use the (Optional) Title to use for reviews using this form box to add a different name that will show to employees/managers. For example, you may have multiple check-in forms so in Form Design need to differentiate between them - "Check-in (Sales"), "Check-in (Marketing)" etc. But employees/managers only need see the title "Check-in" when they set one up so put that in this field. Use the review groups feature to control which form each group of people has access to.