Oracle’s Redwood experience continues to transform the way HR teams interact with Performance and Goals modules. With a modern UI, intuitive workflows, AI-driven insights, and simplified manager–employee interactions, Redwood does more than change the look and feel—it fundamentally enhances productivity, decision-making, and engagement.
But every enhancement also brings a shared responsibility for HR, IT, and QA teams: ensuring that the new features work flawlessly for every user, in every cycle, without disrupting critical HR processes.
In this blog, we decode the latest Redwood features in Performance and Goals, explore how they benefit businesses, and highlight why continuous test automation is essential—especially with Oracle’s continuous quarterly updates.
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Performance & Feedback Module – Redwood Features Explained
HR, Employee & Manager Responsive Pages Converted to Redwood
The Redwood UX transformation has been applied to all primary Performance and Feedback pages, unifying the experience for HR, employees, and managers. This is a major step in transforming the Human Capital Management experience to ensure higher adoption and more efficient use of core performance management processes across the organization.
What it means: All primary Performance and Feedback pages across HR, manager, and employee roles now run on Redwood UX.
Business benefits:
- Cleaner, faster, and mobile-responsive workflows
- Reduced training efforts due to intuitive navigation
- Higher adoption of performance processes
Notifications Converted to Redwood
The conversion of Notifications to Redwood UX ensures a modern, visually consistent, and responsive experience across all Oracle Cloud applications. This update applies the Redwood design system to both in-app and email notifications for various processes, including Procurement, Performance, and other workflow approvals.
What it means: System-generated notifications (reminders, approvals, deadline alerts) now follow Redwood styling and logic.
Business benefits:
- Consistent experience across all touchpoints
- Improved clarity and actionability of notifications
GenAI Features for Manager Evaluation
The Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM Redwood experience embeds Generative AI (GenAI) directly into the Performance Management module, transforming the traditionally time-consuming and inconsistent process of manager evaluation.
What it means: Managers can leverage generative AI to summarize performance data, draft evaluations, and refine feedback.
Business benefits:
- Faster evaluation cycles
- More objective reviews
- Better-quality feedback
All-In-One Evaluation – Mass Evaluation for Managers
This feature is designed to streamline the performance review process by allowing managers to evaluate multiple direct reports simultaneously from a single interface, significantly boosting efficiency during annual review cycles.
What it means: Managers can evaluate multiple employees in a unified view.
Business benefits:
- Speeds up bulk performance cycles
- Reduces navigation complexity
- Minimizes manager workload during review season
Check-in Calendar Invites
Check-ins introduce a crucial feature for efficiency, i.e. the automatic generation of calendar meeting invites. When a manager or employee schedules a check-in within the system, they can now opt to create an accompanying .ics calendar file, which is instantly downloaded.
What it means: Check-ins can now automatically generate calendar invites for both employees and managers.
Business benefits:
- Better scheduling discipline
- Higher participation in check-ins
- Transparent communication
Manager–Employee Check-ins (including In-Target Reports)
This feature serves as a streamlined process for fostering continuous dialogue between workers and managers, moving beyond traditional annual reviews.
What it means: Redwood improves the collaboration between managers, and their in-target reports through streamlined check-in UI.
Business benefits:
- Improved coaching conversations
- Real-time feedback tracking
- Higher employee satisfaction
Competencies & Dynamic Skills as Part of Check-ins
Check-ins now feature seamless integration of both established Competencies and the more agile Dynamic Skills from the Skills Center as dedicated discussion topics. This ensures that career conversations move beyond annual reviews to focus continuously on real-time development.
What it means: Performance conversations now incorporate competencies and dynamic skills directly.
Business benefits:
- Clear alignment with skill-building
- Better development plans
- More measurable outcomes
Control Check-in Templates
This feature allows HR administrators to precisely manage the availability of structured check-in documents across the organization.
What it means: HR can define and manage check-in templates for consistency.
Business benefits:
- Standardized performance conversations
- Governance over feedback processes
Scored Questionnaires
This feature integrates quantifiable feedback directly into the performance process.
What it means: Performance questionnaires now support automatic scoring.
Business benefits:
- Objective evaluation criteria
- Faster scoring and decision-making
- Reduced manual effort
Mass Share Performance
This feature allows HR to share completed performance documents and check-ins with a large group of employees simultaneously.
What it means: Performance documents can now be shared with multiple stakeholders simultaneously.
Business benefits:
- Faster review cycles
- Better visibility for HR and leadership
Goals Module – Redwood Features Explained
Responsive Pages Converted to Redwood
This update focuses on migrating existing responsive setup and transaction pages to the modern Oracle Redwood design standard.
What it means: Redwood UI for employee, manager, and HR goal management.
Benefit: Unified, intuitive goal-setting experience.
Single UI for Performance & Goals
This feature consolidates performance management and goal setting into one cohesive interface.
What it means: Oracle merges the interface into a single cohesive workspace.
Benefits:
- Faster navigation
- Reduced cognitive load
- Improved adoption by managers
AI-Suggested Goals
AI-Suggested Goals use machine learning to accelerate and enhance goal creation to reduce the effort required to write meaningful goals and improve overall corporate alignment.
What it means: Oracle uses AI to suggest organizationally aligned goals.
Benefits:
- Smarter, consistent goal setting
- Helps employees pick relevant objectives
- Reduces HR workload
Secure Goal Actions with New Privileges
With this feature, organizations can precisely delegate who can perform critical tasks, thereby strengthening data integrity and audit compliance within the goals process.
What it means: Enhanced security framework around goal actions.
Benefits:
- Reduced risk of unauthorized changes
- Stronger compliance posture
Embedded GenAI Features
Embedding GenAI transforms the efficiency of goal management. Generative AI drastically cuts down the time spent creating quality goals and ensures better alignment with best practices.
What it means: AI-driven drafting for goals, descriptions, alignment, and progress reports.
Benefits:
- Better quality goals
- Saves time for employees and managers
Why Oracle Redwood Migration Requires Thorough Testing
Redwood isn’t just a UI upgrade—it’s a complete transformation of how the Performance & Goals modules function. With Oracle introducing AI-driven workflows, personalized responsive pages, and new security privilege structures, the complexity of testing has grown exponentially.
Here’s why enterprises can no longer rely on manual testing alone:
Redwood Is Constantly Changing—Not Just the UI
While the shift to Redwood brings visually sleek and user-friendly interfaces, every redesign introduces new components, layouts, and navigation paths.
These changes impact:
- Page rendering
- Field behavior
- Workflow sequencing
- Cross-module dependencies
Implication: After every quarterly update, even a small UI tweak can break previously stable test scripts or user flows. This makes consistent regression testing mandatory.
AI Embedded into Performance & Goals Introduces New Testing Dimensions
Oracle has embedded AI across the performance lifecycle:
- AI for manager evaluations
- AI-generated feedback summaries
- AI-suggested goals for employees
- AI assistance in drafting goal descriptions
- AI for identifying competencies and skills
AI behaves differently based on context, data, role, and model updates. This introduces testing complexities such as:
- Data-driven AI output validation
- Role-based AI visibility verification
- Ensuring AI-generated text is appropriate and aligned
- Checking that AI does not expose restricted or sensitive performance data
Why automation is required:
AI outcomes cannot be manually validated at scale. Automation frameworks with data-driven and role-aware capabilities are essential to ensure predictable behavior.
Personalization in Responsive Pages Increases Testing Combinations
Redwood responsive pages allow organizations to personalize layouts for:
- Different user roles
- Departments or business units
- Performance cycles
- Custom templates
- Skill-based or competency-based configurations
While personalization improves user experience, it multiplies the number of scenarios that must be tested:
- Each variation must render correctly
- Each user type must see the right fields
- Conditional sections must appear or hide based on rules
- Workflows must remain consistent across custom pages
As personalization expands, even small errors can disrupt large-scale performance cycles.
Redwood Requires Additional & Updated Security Privileges
Oracle has tightened security controls across Redwood modules by introducing:
- New privileges for goal actions
- Updated permissions for mass evaluations
- New AI-related security settings
- Additional access controls for consolidated pages
- Changes to role provisioning related to Redwood pages
Organizations using custom roles must now re-test:
- Privilege mappings
- Data access rules
- What each role can or cannot modify
- Whether privilege changes break downstream HR workflows
Oracle’s Quarterly Updates Introduce Continuous Change
Every quarterly update brings:
- New Redwood components
- Enhancement to AI behavior
- Updated notifications
- Security privilege modifications
- Backend logic upgrades
- API and workflow changes
Without automation, HR and IT teams often scramble to validate changes manually—leading to delays, defects, or production issues during critical appraisal cycles.
Redwood has transformed Performance and Goals into a highly dynamic ecosystem powered by AI, personalization, and enhanced security—but these same innovations have dramatically increased testing complexity. This is where Opkey’s Redwood Migration Accelerator comes in.
Here’s how Opkey can help
Opkey’s Redwood Migration Accelerator generates a detailed migration roadmap and outlines a risk-based testing strategy to help you optimize your resources, set realistic timelines and milestones, and track your migration progress. Opkey helps you achieve end-to-end testing coverage for critical business processes by performing regression testing, performance testing, and compatibility testing across browsers and devices, to preserve functionality and maintain the integrity of your business processes.
Want to learn more about Opkey, schedule a demo.
