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Peer reviews consist of two phases: nominations and feedback. This ensures employees give feedback to colleagues they’ve actually worked with.

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How peer reviews work

The peer review process unfolds in two distinct stages:

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Nomination phase

Windy prompts employees to nominate peers for review. Using existing work context around collaboration, Windy can suggest relevant peers based on:
  • Shared projects and meetings
  • Slack conversations and channels
  • Connected tool activity (Jira, GitHub, shared docs)
Employees can accept suggestions or nominate other colleagues. Once nominations are submitted, they determine who provides feedback to whom. Employees can manage nominations in the Windmill platform or through Windy in Slack. Depending on the cycle settings, managers or cycle admins can review nominations before peer feedback opens.

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Feedback phase

After nominations close, peer feedback opens. Employees can answer in the Windmill platform or use the Slack thread that Windy sends for each peer they’re reviewing. In Slack, the conversation is interactive. Employees respond to questions, and Windy asks follow-up questions to ensure feedback is specific and actionable. Windy follows up on vague responses to ensure feedback is specific and grounded in concrete examples.

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Your context report

Before your peer feedback conversation opens, Windy prepares a private context report on the work you and the person you’re reviewing did together during the review period. It’s a memory jog, not an assessment — it doesn’t rate them or suggest what to write. Windy links to the report in the Slack message that opens your feedback conversation. You can also open it from the review in the Windmill Dashboard and export it as Markdown or PDF. The report opens with a short summary of where your work overlapped, then walks through the projects you shared, with cited examples of what the person did. If you shared little recorded work, the report stays short rather than filling space. The context report is visible only to you. It draws only on sources you can already access, so it never surfaces anything outside your permissions. The person you’re reviewing never sees it, and it isn’t part of their review packet.

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Visibility and privacy

The subject of peer feedback never sees what was written about them. Peer feedback goes into the review packet for the subject’s manager, skip-levels, and cycle admins, who use it when drafting the manager review. For the full picture of who sees what — including how visibility applies to cycle admins and calibration committees — see Who sees what.

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Configuring peer reviews

When creating a performance review cycle, you configure the questions for peer feedback—the prompts Windy will guide employees through. Peer reviews support the same seven question types as all other review types:
  • Written responses — Text
  • Choice responses — Single Select, Multi-Select, and Yes/No
  • Scored responses — Scale, eNPS, and Rating

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Creating questions

You configure questions directly in the cycle creation wizard when setting up the peer feedback stage. Example peer feedback questions:
  • What are this person’s greatest strengths when collaborating on projects?
  • Can you share a specific example of this person’s impact on a recent project or outcome?
  • What’s one area where this person could grow or improve?

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Best practices for questions

  • Keep it conversational — Write questions as if you’re asking them in person
  • Focus on specifics — Ask for examples, projects, or outcomes
  • Limit to 3-5 questions — Windy will follow up naturally based on responses
Windy is trained to ask follow-up questions if responses are vague, so you don’t need to include every possible follow-up in your question set.

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Scheduling and participants

When configuring the peer feedback stage:
  • Nomination schedule — Set when nominations open and when they’re due
  • Feedback schedule — Set when feedback conversations open and when they’re due
  • Who participates — Optionally filter to a subset of employees for this stage (or use the cycle-level filter)
  • Nomination limits — Set a suggested minimum and a maximum to control nomination volume
  • Approval rules — Choose whether managers or cycle admins must approve nominations

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Editing responses

Employees can edit their responses in the Windmill platform until the deadline, regardless of where they started the review. Windy also sends a link to the written feedback.

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FAQs

Yes. Cycle admins can configure peer nomination limits and approval rules. These settings help control how many peer review requests each person receives. The configured minimum is a recommendation, and the maximum limits nominations.
Yes. Any active member of your Windmill account can be nominated as a peer reviewer, even if they aren’t a participant in the cycle itself. This is useful for getting feedback from cross-functional collaborators—for example, a partner on another team who worked closely with the subject but isn’t being reviewed in this cycle.Once nominated, the peer receives a review task. They can complete it in the Windmill platform or through Windy in Slack. Their feedback flows into the subject’s review packet just like feedback from in-cycle nominees.
Yes. Open your nominations in the Windmill platform and add another peer. You can also reply in your peer nomination Slack thread and ask Windy to add them.
Yes. Open your nominations in the Windmill platform to add, remove, or replace a nominee. You can also ask Windy to make the change in your peer nomination Slack thread.
Yes. Employees can edit their responses in the Windmill platform until the deadline, regardless of where they completed the review.This allows employees to:
  • Refine answers after reflecting further
  • Add examples they remembered later
  • Adjust phrasing for clarity
When collecting feedback, Windy is trained to ask for more specific, constructive input. If responses are vague, Windy follows up with prompts focused on work products and outcomes rather than personalities.For example, when collecting peer feedback, Windy might ask:
  • “What project or outcome are you referring to?”
  • “Can you share a specific example of their impact on a recent project?”
  • “In which ways did they make the process smoother?”
By encouraging feedback focused on work products rather than personalities, Windmill ensures that performance reviews are more actionable, fair, and grounded in reality.
Peer feedback goes to the subject’s manager, skip-levels, and cycle admins, and is included in the review packet. Peer feedback is never shared with the subject.Managers synthesize peer feedback with other signals (self review, upward feedback, system data) when drafting reviews. See Who sees what for the full breakdown.
Yes. When creating a cycle, you configure the questions for peer feedback. These are the prompts Windy uses to guide the conversation in Slack. Peer reviews support Text, Single Select, Multi-Select, Yes/No, Scale, eNPS, and Rating questions.Questions are fully customizable to match your company’s review process.Learn more in Cycles.
Nominators are still prompted to provide feedback on the departed employee. The peer feedback slot does not disappear when someone is archived—their historical record, including peer feedback collected about them, is preserved in Windmill.This ensures cycle data remains complete and that managers and skip-levels still receive the context they need when reviewing the departed employee’s tenure.
If a deadline passes and peer feedback is still not submitted:
  • The status changes to overdue in the tracking views
  • Cycle admins can see who’s behind in the All Todos view
  • The employee can still submit after the deadline
Windmill sends automated reminders before and on the deadline to minimize late submissions.