Table of Contents
Introduction
When you’re crafting templates for an upcoming review cycle, you're aiming to ask the questions that lead to the insights you need with zero ambiguity. That's why it's all about trust and honest communication. ✊
Wouldn’t it be even better if, alongside thoughtful, wordy responses, you had something simple and clear that helped sum things up? Some kind of indicator that is a little bit less open to interpretation and shows you exactly how aligned the manager and employee really are? Something tidy, visual, numeric ... like a score?
Good news! 🌟 Indigo’s Performance Management includes built-in scoring, and it’s gloriously easy to set up, right from the template level:
🖱️ Toggle scoring on or off with a single click.
⚖️ Choose which questions are core, and which just help drive the conversation.
🤝 See how aligned manager and employee evaluations and expectations are.
Backed by Indigo’s intuitive score weighting system, your appraisals can stay as open and conversational as needed, while still delivering measurable, clear outcomes. So take the guesswork out of the post-review stage with score-enabled templates. 🎯
📚 Documentation tip:
This article is your go-to guide for building effective templates that support scored performance reviews. It covers everything a budding template builder needs to know: from enabling (or disabling) scoring to setting up score weighting. ⚖️
If reviews with scores have already started appearing in your grids and you'd like to know more ...
Template Requirements for Scoring
Taking full advantage of this feature means preparing an effective template for scored performance reviews. Here's what you need to do:
Make sure there’s at least one numeric question in your template.
The three numeric question types available in the template builder are Multiple Choice, Numeric Rating Scale, and (🌟) Rating. Short and long answer types don’t impact scoring.
Enable scoring for the template.
Lay out your questions into sections.
Assign score weighting.
The following sections are about enabling or disabling scoring and managing score weighting. Click the blue words for more information 📚 on sections and questions.
Enabling Scoring
All templates created after the release of the Scoring feature (Indigo 1.199.0.0 | 11th June, 2025) have scoring enabled by default.
To enable scoring on an old template, or reenable it after having disabled it:
Open the relevant template.
Click the blue, underlined text: Enable Scoring.
This will appear just below the blue + Add Section button only if scoring is currently disabled.
🤔 I'm not sure if scoring is enabled in my template ...
You can check this by opening the template and looking under the Template Builder section. If scoring is enabled, ✅ you’ll see the blue “Update Score Weighting” text in the bottom-left corner.
Disabling Scoring
Disabling Scoring
Running a more relaxed, unscored review? You can either create a dedicated template or disable scoring on an existing one (just remember to switch scoring back on after you launch the unscored review 😅).
To disable scoring:
Open the required template and make sure it has at least one section.
Click the triple-dotted kebab menu button right next to + Add Section.
Click Disable Scoring.
Click the blue button in the bottom-right corner.
This button will be labelled as either Update or Save, depending on whether you're adjusting a new or existing template.
✅ Great! Performance reviews started from this template won’t display any scores and, as a result, won’t be affected by score weighting until scoring is re-enabled on the template.
📓 Note: Numeric type questions in the template will still work as intended and display their own individual ratings, based on how they're answered (such as 5/5 stars or 7/10). However, their answers won’t feed into sectional or global performance scores until scoring is switched back on.
Score Weighting
📖 Good to know!
Before you dive into building your template, it helps to understand how Indigo’s scoring is layered. There are three types of scores:
Question scores: The score for an individual question, determined by how well it is answered.
Section scores: The total score of a section which is an average of all numeric question scores within that section.
Global performance score: The final score, likewise based on all section scores.
Templates in Indigo are basically questionnaires; different types of questions grouped into sections to help guide performance conversations. In score-enabled templates, each section and numeric question has a weight: a whole number (like 1, 2, 5, or 10) that tells the system how important it is compared to the rest.
By default, every question and section has a weight of 1, meaning everything impacts the score equally. You can leave it that way and scoring will still work, but the real power of score weighting is in the control it gives you on your reviews' focus.
⚖️ The power of score weighting!
Want to shift the focus of your Impact & Growth reviews onto impact without removing questions from or deleting the Growth section? Just assign higher weights 🏋️ to your Impact section and the questions that ask for real insight, rather than the lighter, conversational ones.
For Example ... 🖱️
For Example ... 🖱️
Promotion month is around the corner, and management have tasked Mr. Strongman—their sharp-eyed, hardworking HR admin—with solving three of their hottest talent questions: 🔥
Which of our employees are our top performers?
Which of our employees have improved the most?
Who is ready for a promotion?
Strongman reasons that the first two concerns are about impact right now, whilst the last one is about growth potential. To answer all three clearly and fairly, he concludes the review template must put the spotlight on what matters most right now, without losing sight of where people are headed.
So he builds a review with two distinct sections:
🏆 Section 1: Impact | Weight: 2
Here, Strongman places all the questions that help managers evaluate an employee’s current contributions; things like delivering results, driving outcomes, raising the bar for their team, and learning from feedback.
🌱 Section 2: Growth | Weight: 1
In this section, he includes questions that examine an employee’s trajectory; their potential, ambition, and investment in their own development.
As you've also noticed, Strongman set Impact to be weighted twice (2) as heavily as Growth (1). Why?
“Because Management wants to know who’s not just improving but also delivering now. We can’t promote someone purely on promise (growth potential). We need people who are already making an impact and growing into bigger shoes.”
In practice, employees who score higher in Impact will have a higher global performance score than those who have poor Impact but higher Growth, thanks to the way Strongman designed the review with the current weighting. One way to look at it, scoring 100% in the first section earns you 66% of the global performance score, whilst at most, the second section is only worth 33% (half).
Long story short, this setup is empowered by score weighting to spotlight the employees management are looking for, without changing the experience for those actually filling out the questionnaire. ⚖️💪
As you can imagine, there’s some serious maths being crunched behind the scenes to keep things fair (especially when factoring in questions with specific visibility and your template's overall structure). But not to worry! ✊ The system has been designed so you don't have to deal with any of it as you set score weighting up.
Setting It Up
The magic happens on the Score Weighting screen.
Open the required template or start a new one.
Click the blue, underlined Update score weighting text button. This opens the Score Weighting screen.
Note: This link appears in the bottom-left corner of the template builder, but only when scoring is enabled. If you can’t see it, you may need to enable scoring first. See the section above on how to do that. ⬆️
In the new screen, adjust the weighting using the number fields provided.
You can assign weights both at the section level (stamped 1) and for each individual numeric question within a section (stamped 2).
To show or hide the questions and their weighting fields, click the corresponding header (stamped 3). This will expand or collapse the list of questions within that section.
To exclude a section or question from scoring, set its weighting to 0.
📣 By the way! This screen autosaves as you go, so there’s no save or update button to click, and no risk of losing your work if you forget. 😅
⚠️ Don’t forget: You’ll still need to click the blue Update or Save button to publish any changes you’ve made—including score weighting adjustments—once you exit the score weighting screen.
Weights as Percentages
The screen also includes a Show percentage toggle, which reveals or hides a column showing the percentage weighting of each section and question.
When this toggle is enabled, two new buttons—Employee and Manager—appear beside it. Clicking either adjusts the percentage column to reflect only the relevant questions.
For example, selecting Manager will display ‘N/A’ for questions directed at the employee, and vice versa.
Non-numeric questions will always show ‘N/A’, as they do not contribute to scoring.
Don’t let the % symbols intimidate you! 🤓 Percentages update instantly when you adjust any weights, making it easier to track the effect of your changes. It’s all relative, and the percentages will help you visualise how each section and question contributes to the overall score, and show the impact of your changes right away.
In the image above, when both sections had a weighting of 1, they each showed 50%. Now, the Impact section is weighted at 2—twice the weight of the Growth section—so it contributes 66.67% to the total score. This means that, in general, someone who scores higher in the Impact section will more likely have a higher overall review score than someone who scores higher in the Growth section.
At the question level within the Growth section, question 1 isn’t counted at all due to its weight of 0. Question 2 has half the impact of question 3, based on their respective weights.
🧠 Smart system: Notice that in the same example, question 3 appears only in the manager version of the template. For this reason, it will impact the manager's score for this section, but not the employee’s (it will count like having a weight of 0 for the employee). As a result, if question 2 is the only remaining scored, numeric question for the employee, it will account for 100% of their score for that section. This way, scoring remains fair. ⚖️
