How the Documents feature works

Documents in Teamspective let you create and manage things like individual development plans (IDPs), performance assessments, and individual targets. They live in the Performance section, alongside structured and growth feedback.

Every document is always about a specific person — its subject — and lives in that person's performance context. It's less like a free-form file (such as a Google Doc) and more like a structured record tied to one person's development or performance.

Document types

Teamspective includes three built-in document types:

• Individual Development Plan (IDP) — for career growth and development planning.

• Performance Assessment — for manager evaluations of team members.

• Individual Targets — for goals, objectives, and key results.

Admins can also create custom document types.

Who is allowed to create a given document — the employee themselves, or only their manager — is controlled by the template, not by the document type. Any type, built-in or custom, can be set up either way.

Templates

Every document starts from a template. Templates define the starting structure — sections, guiding questions, and placeholder content — and control settings such as:

• Approval type — no sign-off required, formal approval, or acknowledgment before the document is finalized.

• Who can create it — employees themselves, or only their manager.

• Subject access — whether the person the document is about gets editor, viewer, or no access.

• Manager access — whether the subject's manager can automatically view the document, without needing to be added as a separate share.

• Public sharing — whether editors can create a public link to the document.

• Individual sharing — whether the creator can manually share the document with specific people.

• Section headers — whether people can delete the template's section headers or must keep them.

• AI guidance — instructions that tailor the AI coaching to this specific document type.

Templates can also be limited to specific groups of people (segments) — both for who is allowed to create documents from the template, and who automatically gets access. If a template has no group restriction on creation, anyone with access can create a document from it; add a restriction to limit creation to a specific group.

Admins can duplicate a template to reuse its full setup — content, settings, and sharing rules all carry over — and manage all templates from the Document Templates tab in structured feedback settings.

Creating and editing

Create documents from the Documents tab in the Performance section. Managers see their direct reports there and can create documents for them; if the template allows self-creation, employees can create their own too.

Documents start as a draft and can be edited freely. When collaborative editing is enabled, multiple people can work on the same document at the same time, with changes syncing live — so edits aren't lost or overwritten when several people are working on it together. Documents created before this feature was available switch over automatically the first time someone opens them for collaborative editing.

Sharing and access

Documents are private by default — people only see a document if they've been given access. Access can come from:

• The creator (full edit access)

• The subject, based on the template's setting

• A reviewer, once a review has been requested

• Groups (segments) defined on the template

• Manual shares added by the creator, if the template allows it

• Manager access, if enabled — always view-only, with no ability to edit, share, or delete

• A public link, if the template allows it — grants view or edit access to anyone with the link, and can be turned off at any time to remove that access

Review and approval

Depending on the template's approval type:

• None — no review step; the creator marks the document as ready once it's done.

• Approval — the creator requests a review, usually from the manager, who can approve it or send it back to draft for more work.

• Acknowledgment — the subject acknowledges the document. This is a lighter step than approval — there's no send-back option, just acknowledgment.

When a document is approved, any earlier approved document of the same type for the same person is automatically archived.

Reminders

Templates can send automated reminders:

• Draft stale — to the creator, when a draft hasn't been updated for a set number of days (this is configurable).

• Review stale — to the reviewer, when a review has been pending for a set number of days.

• Acknowledgment stale — to the subject, when an acknowledgment has been pending.

• Missing document — to people who should have a document but don't yet, after a grace period. This only applies when self-creation is enabled — manager-only templates never send this reminder.

Editing a document resets its stale timer, and people won't be reminded about the same thing twice in a short period.

AI features

• Coach evaluation — reviews each section of a document and flags it as complete, partial, or empty, with suggestions for improvement.

• Tips — suggests focus areas and feedback questions based on the content.

• Template evaluation — helps admins improve a template itself, with section-by-section ratings and a suggested improved version.

Document lifecycle

Only drafts can be deleted; approved and archived documents are kept.