When setting up an assessment cycle, you can rate your organization's values in two places: as competencies on the rubric, or as custom questions in the cycle configuration. Both work — but they behave differently, and choosing the right one affects how the data surfaces and what employees experience.

Before choosing a placement, it's worth asking whether your values are actually competencies.

A competency is something that progresses with seniority — it looks meaningfully different at one level vs. the next. "Strategic Communication" or "Stakeholder Management" are good competency candidates because a senior person genuinely does them differently than a junior person.

Many values — Integrity, Honesty, Transparency — don't work this way. They're baseline expectations, not developmental gradients. You don't get better at not lying as you become more senior. These behaviors may show up in different contexts across levels, but the underlying expectation doesn't fundamentally advance.

Implication: Rating this type of value on the 1–5 Building→Outperforming scale misrepresents it. A "2 (Improving)" on Integrity signals something very different than a "2 (Improving)" on a technical skill — and managers may struggle to rate it meaningfully.

If your values fall into this category, custom questions are almost always the better fit. Or consider whether a qualitative discussion is more appropriate than a rating at all.

What it is: Values are added to the rubric as named competencies and rated on the standard 1–5 scale (Building → Outperforming) during the assessment.

What this looks like for employees: Values appear alongside role-based competencies in the assessment flow. Employees rate themselves, managers rate them, and ratings appear on the calibration chart.

Advantages: - Values ratings impact the Progress Ring and appear in Analytics. - Managers can see self vs. manager alignment on values directly. - Consistent rating scale across all competencies — no one-off scoring logic.

Trade-offs: - Values become part of the competency library and follow the shared naming rules (same name = same description across rubrics). - If values don't apply equally across all roles, managing them across multiple rubrics adds complexity. - Rating values on the 1–5 scale only makes sense if those values genuinely progress with seniority. For baseline expectations like Integrity, a numerical rating implies a gradient that doesn't exist.

What it is: Values are added as questions in the cycle's reflection/custom question section. Managers and employees respond in freeform text or with a custom rating scale you define.

What this looks like for employees: Custom questions appear in the "reflection" stage of the assessment, separate from competency ratings.

Advantages: - More flexible framing — you can ask qualitative questions ("What does [Value] look like in this person's day-to-day?") rather than requiring a numerical rating. - Custom questions are configured per cycle, so they're easier to change without touching the rubric. - Keeps values out of the Progress Ring if that's intentional.

Trade-offs: - Custom question responses don't roll up into Analytics or affect the ring. - Less structured — harder to compare values alignment across the team. - If you're rating values anyway (even in freeform), the data lives in cycle responses rather than the employee's competency history. - If the cycle includes an overall performance rating, managers are still expected to incorporate their view of values adherence into that holistic rating — even if values live in custom questions. Custom questions keep values out of the ring and Analytics, but they don't remove values from the manager's judgment when a performance rating is at stake.

Use competencies if: - Your values describe behaviors that genuinely progress with seniority — not just baseline expectations. - You want values ratings to feed into performance data and Analytics. - You want manager/employee alignment on values to appear in the calibration chart. - Values apply consistently across all roles in your rubric.

Use custom questions if: - Your values are baseline expectations (Integrity, Honesty, Inclusion) rather than developmental skills. - Your values check is more qualitative than numerical. - You want flexibility to change the framing each cycle without editing the rubric. - You don't want values to influence the Progress Ring.

Key Consideration: If you're rating values in custom questions and also rating them as competencies, you're doing double the work. Pick one approach and commit to it.

For questions, contact support@pando.com or use the in-app chat.