What Are Participants in a Review?
In Factorial, participants in a performance review include:
- Reviewees: Employees being evaluated.
- Reviewers: Individuals providing the evaluation.
Participants can be added manually or through dynamic groups based on criteria like teams or workplaces.
Understanding Participant Roles
Different roles have varying permissions within the review process:
- Employees: Can view and complete their assigned reviews.
- Managers: Can evaluate their direct reports and may have access to their team's review progress.
- Administrators: Have full access to create, manage, and monitor all reviews and participants.
How Are Participants Defined in a Review?
Participants in a performance review are automatically defined based on two main settings you choose during the review setup: Review Types and Audience.
1. Define Participant Roles in the Review Types Step
During the review creation flow, you'll find a step called Review Types. Here, you choose who will evaluate whom:
- Self-review: Employees evaluate themselves.
- Manager to direct reports: Managers evaluate their team members.
- Direct reports to manager: Team members evaluate their manager.
- Peer review: Colleagues evaluate one another.
Depending on your selection here, the participants will be assigned automatically. For example, selecting “Manager to direct reports” will generate evaluation paths between each manager and their direct team.
You can choose one or combine several types within the same review.

2. Select Who Will Participate in the Audience Step
In the Audience step of the review setup, you define who will be involved:
- Entire company: All employees are included.
- Specific teams or locations: Select by team, department, or site.
- Custom selection: Manually choose individual employees.

The participants (both reviewers and reviewees) will be defined based on this group and the review type(s) you selected.
How to Edit Participants After Creating the Review
If you've already created the review and need to change the participants:
- Go to the Sidebar and click on Performance
- Select the Review you want to edit
- At the top right, click Edit Review
- Navigate to the Audience section
- From here, you can:
- Change the group of people involved
- Add or remove specific employees
