This release adds a third approval step to the review cycle, gives you finer control over who can see what, and makes AI Assist more accurate and more consistent. Fourteen fixes also went out across reviews, surveys, integrations and mobile.

An approval step before a review is finalised

Reviews can now pass through a third party before they complete. Once the reviewee and reviewer have filled in their sections, the review goes to HR or a senior approver, who is the one to finalise it. Reviewers can be prevented from completing a review themselves, so nothing reaches the employee until it has been signed off.

Employee development features now sit in one module

Objectives, skills, training and the rest of the development tools have been brought together under a single Development menu, in the same way performance management is already grouped. There is less hunting through the navigation to find the area you need.

Company Documents can be hidden from selected security groups

A new security group setting controls whether the Company area of Documents is visible. Turn it off and Company Documents disappears from the Documents menu and from the tabs in Files, while personal documents keep working as normal. This stops people uploading personal paperwork into the company area, and is useful where company files already live on an existing intranet.

Select all when assigning an objective to your team

Managers setting the same objective for everyone they manage can now tick Select all rather than choosing each person in turn.

Personal details and emergency contacts can be made read-only

A new person setting stops employees editing their own personal details, emergency contact and next of kin, so the record stays as HR entered it. Where editing is allowed, the employee's manager is notified when a change is made.

Managers can be hidden from their own succession plan

A new toggle in People & Groups, "Disable Manager view of themself in Succession Planning", removes a manager from the Succession Planning Dashboard table when they have a manager of their own. They keep full visibility of the people they are planning for.

Review templates are chosen from cards, not a dropdown

When an employee adds a review, the template list is now shown as cards, matching the layout already used in Manage Reviews. It is easier to tell templates apart, and it lays out properly on a phone.

The review panel colour can be changed to match your brand

The blue panel in the review screen is no longer fixed. It can be set to a colour of your choosing, so reviews sit alongside the rest of your branding.

Departments, Sites and Regions added to the Settings menu

These three areas are now linked directly from the Settings menu rather than being reached through another screen.

A reworked 9-box grid with filters and manager access

The 9-box grid dashboard has been rebuilt and can now be filtered by team, review template and date range. Managers can be given access to it, and the grid respects their visibility permissions, so each person sees only the people they are entitled to see. The grid's labels are also available to AI Assist, and a prompt can now be narrowed to a specific review template or period.

More accurate AI Assist reporting

AI Assist now excludes leavers from reports and figures unless you ask for them, shows people's names rather than their internal ID numbers, and tells the difference between training objectives and training logs. Reports built from a prompt should now match what you would get from the equivalent report in the platform.

AI Assist remembers the data it has already looked at

AI Assist now carries the data it has retrieved from one message to the next, instead of starting again each time you reply. You can refine a report over several messages, and answers come back faster and cost less to produce.

Cleaner AI Assist replies

AI Assist no longer writes out its working in the chat. Its reasoning happens out of sight and you are left with the answer.

New accounts start on the current version of Holidays & Absence

Newly created accounts are now set up directly on rules-based Holidays & Absence, so there is no migration step to run before the current absence rules can be used. New accounts also start with the latest optional features switched on rather than having to be enabled one at a time.

Fourteen fixes across the platform

  • Reviewee lists limited to the people you manage — when a manager adds a review, objective, task or worksheet, the person list now shows their direct reports rather than everyone on the platform. The full list still appears for anyone with the Everyone permission.
  • Profiles outside a manager's team are no longer reachable — a manager could open the profile of someone two levels below them via the Manage Requests table. Profile access now follows the same visibility rules as the rest of the platform.
  • Archived reviews removed from self-assign — deactivated review templates were still offered to employees adding a review for themselves. Only active templates now appear.
  • Scored and option questions can be reordered — drag-and-drop reordering only worked on text questions. Scored and multiple-option questions can now be moved into any order.
  • Response times showing on survey reports — some responses came through without a date and time, leaving a blank column on the report. Every response now records when it was submitted.
  • Article images available on surveys built from a template — starting an engagement survey from a template left the article image option greyed out until the topic tag had been changed. It is now available straight away.
  • Recent department and role changes appear on the Movers report — the Movers Departments and Roles report was not picking up recent changes. It now reports on changes as they happen, and follows the Everyone permission and manager reporting lines.
  • Deleted people no longer counted in dashboards — deleted records were still appearing in the objectives and reviews dashboards and the figures behind them. They are now excluded everywhere, and offboarding closes off any objectives and reviews left open.
  • New people arrive awaiting activation — people synced from an HR system were created in an active state and could sign in before launch. They now come in awaiting activation, with an auto-activate setting on the integration for anyone who wants the previous behaviour. Records can also be filtered on custom fields, such as employee type, before they sync.
  • Changing an email address no longer creates a second account — when someone's email changed in the connected HR system, the sync created a new person record rather than updating the existing one. The change is now applied to the same record, so history and permissions stay intact.
  • All records sync from IRIS Cascade — a large batch of people marked to sync was left showing as not synced after the sync had run. Records now come through in full when Auto Sync is on.
  • Microsoft 365 authentication warning cleared — a red warning appeared on the Microsoft 365 integration screen while the integration was working normally. It now only shows when there is a real problem to fix.
  • Quick Add saves reliably — the Save button on the Add Person quick add panel could stay greyed out even with every required field completed. Save now becomes available as soon as the form is valid.
  • Mobile layout corrected across several screens — completing a survey, adding a comment, voting and playing a video in an article have all been corrected in the activity feed, and the Manage Reviews screen now hides the counters that were covering the review list.