Synergita provides agile employee performance management, employee engagement and OKR solutions to organization that thrives to achieve high performance-driven growth.
350,000 users from 100+ companies across the globe including IT/ITES, Manufacturing, Pharma, Financial Services/FinTech, Retail and Non-Profit sectors trust Synergita for their employee performance management, engagement and OKR.
PerformYard makes performance management easy for everyone, with flexible features for HR and a simple employee experience. Recreate your existing review process online or build out a new performance management strategy. This software supports continuous feedback, 360 reviews, annual reviews, project based reviews, recognition, client feedback, and any other feedback. All your employee assessments now live in one place. Support is always free and unlimited.
Motivate and engage employees with Trakstar's performance management software. Unlimited online performance reviews, automated workflows and reports. Manage performance reviews easily across hundreds or thousands of employees in your organization. Learn how leading mid size companies use Trakstar to increase employee engagement, streamline goal management and create an environment of real-time feedback to drive business growth. See a free demo today!
Leapsome is the all-in-one tool that helps organizations enhance their management processes.
Chosen by companies like Spotify, Northvolt, and Babbel - Leapsome enables a continuous cycle of performance management and personalized learning that makes your people and business thrive.
Highlights from Leapsome's Performance & 360° Reviews: fully customizable and easy to set up, anonymous/non-anonymous feedback, expert templates, skill frameworks, development paths, automations, powerful analytics.
Deliver meaningful performance reviews. Discuss ongoing employee performance, achievements and growth during regular, informal check-ins and performance appraisals.
Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management is a complete solution connecting every human resource process from hire to retire. This provides a consistent experience across devices, enables one source of truth for HR data to improve decision-making, and empowers you with market-leading innovation to address your needs today and into the future.
Simple employee performance management on the cloud, features include 360-degree feedback, goal setting, continuous feedback, project performance-based evaluations, and productivity analysis reporting. AssessTEAM is the Top performance management app on both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Popular in 70+ countries, over 2 million evaluations have been processed on AssessTEAM. Starting at $3, no contracts.
Beyond talent management, Engagedly includes functions for performance management, including 360-degree feedback, goal management, and more. Engagedly offers add-on modules for team collaboration, learning management, employee surveys, and rewards. Based on HR best practices, the Engagedly approach to performance management has been shown to improve engagement at client organizations by as much as 40 percent.
ClearCompany is a performance management system customized for your company to achieve better goal alignment, increase employee engagement, and gain tangible insights into your workforce.Their Performance, Engagement and Goals platform enables you to seamlessly design, automate and manage any type of performance review. ClearCompany ensures that employees and managers are aligned on key priorities, goals and drivers of success.
BambooHR is all-in-one HR software made for small and medium businesses and the people who work in them. Their software makes it easy to collect, maintain, and analyze your people data, improve the way you hire talent, onboard new employees, manage compensation, and develop your company culture. It’s designed to set you free to focus on what matters most—your people.
In this article...
Performance management is about more than just yearly performance reviews that check a box. If you’re committed to improving the current and future work of your employees and the company’s growth according to business objectives, this guide will tell you everything you need to set up a successful continuous performance management process.
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Performance management can’t just be a once per year thing if you want to see actual growth in your employees. Here’s everything your performance management process should include to be successful.
One of the most important parts of performance management is understanding how the employee hopes to move their career in the future. This can mean rising vertically through the company or perhaps integrating new skills and knowledge with non-linear pathing. Setting a career path doesn’t have to dictate every move the employee makes, but it can help clarify decisions about leadership roles, training opportunities, and even the types of projects assigned to the employee.
Short-term goal setting uses the employee’s strengths and current skills along with the manager’s resources to find new ways to help the employee achieve success in their current projects. Whether it’s identifying and working through roadblocks or finding the right internal resource to answer questions, short-term goal setting gives employees and managers a starting place to improve the employee’s performance every day.
An important part of maintaining and improving the employee performance is providing verbal and/or written recognition of the employee’s strengths and contributions to the team. Showing appreciation for the employee’s skills and hard work can go a long way toward improving employee engagement and reinforcing good performance–and it’s a lot less expensive than bonuses or raises (but those are good motivators, too, when appropriate).
When communication is a cycle of nearly everyday feedback, it becomes a casual part of the workday, rather than a Big Conversation that happens only at the designated performance review times. When managers keep lines of communication open in daily or weekly conversations, employees are more likely to respond well to more difficult conversations about how to improve performance.
Coaching employees means asking good questions and listening effectively to help the employee come to answers or solutions to their problems. It also includes following up on goals, projects, and hopes to help the employee through tough times and capitalize on successes. Become familiar with several coaching models and use them to help frame discussions and movements forward.
When planning your new performance management process, think about taking a cyclical view of managing performance. The path to improvement isn’t a straight line or a one-time fix but rather a cycle that repeats and pushes the employee farther along–even if there are some stumbles along the way. Whether you use the Plan Act Monitor Review cycle or one that fits closely with your company’s values and goals, treating performance management as an ongoing process rather than a single yearly task can help managers embrace their role as a coach, mentor, and manager.
Performance management software is a tool designed to help managers write accurate job profiles and expectations, create relevant objectives that align with the company’s goals and mission, document performance, and write appraisals.
The best performance management software will also improve employee engagement through transparency, recognition, SMART goal-setting, and feedback. Each team member can see how they contribute to the organization’s mission and how employee development programs align to business goals.
There are a few common misconceptions about what performance management is and features performance management software should include. Performance management is not:
These are general tasks that help management understand the current state of the corporation. They fall short of the future-facing priority of continuous performance management. Because of this, your performance management software likely won’t include survey tools, learning management, or a ranking system.
Employee performance management software helps align your workforce to corporate objectives, measure and evaluate individual employee performance, and continually measure organizational results. The software digitally tracks all activities that ensure employee goals are consistently met in an effective and efficient manner.
Traditionally, companies conduct performance reviews at least annually. However, it’s important for employees to receive continuous feedback in order to understand how they perform and contribute to corporate goals and how they can take the next steps in their career development. This means aligning and assessing performance regularly by gathering feedback from a direct manager, team members, peers, and indirect managers.
An employee performance management system will offer the following functions, which the company and manager can use to gain insight into an individual’s overall strengths and potential:
Managers use coaching management tools to organize the goals of each of their reports, build career plans, track training and assessments, and store communication and employee evaluation. Many modern coaching management features also provide a place for reports to message and interact with their manager directly via chat.
Many companies have moved from the annual employee performance appraisal model to more frequent performance assessment periods including weekly and monthly. A performance appraisal module gives companies a centralized location to store, analyze, and track changes in their employee performance from year to year and across appraisal periods.
Goal tools help managers and individuals write goals and track their performance toward them in a centralized and consistent manner. Today’s tools prompt individuals to update their progress toward goals, solicit feedback from the managers, and compare progress to benchmarks.
Feedback management tools collect and organize real time feedback around employee goals or performance metrics, giving both the employee and their manager a place to document updates and thoughts regarding goals.
Employee competencies and skills management tools track certifications, skills tests, and licenses that keep the organization compliant with local and state regulations. These tools can also be used to understand an individual’s most valuable skills, plan training, and map succession within the organization.
Career mapping and development planning are key components of any employee engagement plan, and robust performance management software will include tools that support human resources teams and managers in planning long-term career moves with individuals.
Analytics tools help companies determine whether their efforts are paying off. Performance and productivity analytics aggregate performance metrics and employee productivity KPIs to better plan for the next steps and assess the success of current projects.
Many companies base bonus and commission rates on individual performance toward and above goals. Pay for performance modules in performance management systems help teams tie pay directly to accrued metrics and progress toward goals.
Human resources and management teams need quick access to deep information about their employees. Talent profiles give a detailed view of an individual’s skills and proficiencies, without needing to comb through reams of performance reports. These tools can help HR professionals build job descriptions, manage succession planning, and even understand where their teams lack vital skills.
Performance management tools that include multi-rater functionality provide the context for multiple perspectives on an individual’s performance. These tools can be used to conduct 360 reviews — where peers and members of other teams can provide feedback on performance — as well as give review capabilities to multiple levels of the organization.
As with everything in tech today, portability improves both the manager and employee experience by giving them the freedom to complete performance tasks outside of the office, on a commute, or at home. Mobile capabilities also bring performance conversations to a context where many individuals are more comfortable sharing honest feedback: their phone apps.
No modern app is complete without reports and analytics that provide insight into the tool’s effectiveness, the employee’s performance, or the company’s improvement. These modules are a must for proving the worth of the HR tool to a CFO or CEO and can give actionable insight for teams to use when planning future initiatives.
Modern PM software isn’t just for human resources — it’s for employees, managers, and leaders. Today, there are more than one billion knowledge workers worldwide. And these employees become more valuable over time as their knowledge of the industry and the organization’s policies increase. Consequently, performance management has shifted from a competitive performance evaluation model towards ongoing coaching and employee development.
According to HR expert Josh Bersin, “Companies that provide high levels of development planning and coaching to their employees have a third less voluntary turnover and generate twice the revenue per employee of their peers. These are huge returns.”
This shift is supported by performance management systems that offer coaching tips and features for managers such as:
These tools provide a digital record as well as data about how meetings impact performance, engagement, and turnover.
Business priorities change quickly and frequently. A goal set at the beginning of a year may not hold relevance for the company or individual weeks or even months later. As the entire performance appraisal process evolves, it’s best to think of your workforce as a valuable sports team: regular feedback, communication, and coaching will create high levels of performance. To facilitate high performance and employee engagement going forward, it’s necessary to have modern systems that encourage employee feedback, frequent check-ins, collaborative assessments, skill development, and social recognition.
Recruitment, onboarding and training, performance management, and learning and development are tightly woven together. Because of this, one of the biggest trends in HR software is the shift from standalone or best of breed solutions to integrated product suites. Touchpoint solutions for payroll or recruiting provide tailored functionality for specific tasks and niche problems. However, a single vendor solution offers a seamless user interface, easy access to data across the system, and comprehensive analytics.
When choosing a performance management tool, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Different business sizes and types may need additional features, so it’s important to consider your company’s goals, needs, and industry.
That said, the market can be broadly divided a few ways:
To create executive buy-in for a new PM tool, you must build a compelling proposal. Luckily, talent management affects each individual department as well as the organization as a whole. To ensure successful adoption and long-term ROI, focus on what’s in it for your decision-makers. Below are a few ways to align your initiative:
Your technology leadership team is an excellent resource to help you conduct a performance management system comparison. Involving them early on, as they can ensure the new technology will fit with existing systems and infrastructure.
If you’re replacing a self-developed or on-premise legacy solution, a modern talent management system can reduce infrastructure requirements, updates, and support, which frees the IT department to focus on more strategic organizational goals. Additionally, CIOs can determine if a new system aligns with the company’s growth and three to five-year technology lifecycle plan, ensuring it provides a return on investment.
The CIO will eventually manage your new system anyway, so make them an ally upfront. A strong endorsement from IT will give you a better chance of gaining buy-in from other execs.
People build businesses, so developing a world-class workforce is a top priority for CEOs. A performance management system works as an accountability system for individuals, teams, and the organization. Once a CEO sets high-priority objectives, performance management software can ensure departments achieve those objectives. From company goals, departments and teams set their responsibilities, which then cascade into individual performance improvement plans.
Since your CEO is concerned about the big picture, highlight how performance review software helps align workforce skills, development, and performance. The software manages expectations for the results the company expects every single employee to achieve. And by defining clear roles, managers can see if employees perform above or below expectations and can identify where individuals should develop their skills.
Document how the company will evaluate the effectiveness of your performance management system before you implement it. This will be the first thing your Chief Financial Officer wants to know. Identify the outcomes you expect from a successful system implementation, and how your company will measure them. In addition to presenting upfront costs, prepare to outline ways a performance management system will give back to the company — especially regarding the bottom line.
Mention that with performance management software, you can actively manage and track performance investments with metrics. Teams can also use reports and analytics from a modern system to calculate ROI for both revenue and talent growth.
Executives invest in solutions that help the company make money, avoid risk, or that serve long-term strategic purposes. Performance management software fits all of these criteria. Create a common language and shared perspective to connect the dots for decision-makers. Speak their language and use data to back up your proposal whenever possible.
This analysis of the performance management market, prominent features, and current trends can be used as a starting point for your software purchasing decision, as well as a means to create buy-in.
If you need guidance choosing a solution, you can speak with one of our in-house tech advisors to get free personalized product recommendations by phone or use the TechnologyAdvice Product Selection Tool at the top of the page to find recommended products based on the features you need.