Flexible performance management tools empower employees, improve retention, and make HR managers more proactive across the board.
Performance management is one of your most valuable and highest callings as an HR manager … when you’re empowered to do it well. Executives increasingly recognize that performance management needs to be more employee-centric, agile, frequent, and balanced. That’s good news for progressive HR professionals.
Annual performance reviews have fallen out of favor with good reason: they tend to place you at the mercy of the Horrible Hopping Hindsight.
… Yeah, we’re borrowing a character from the children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster to make a point about performance reviews. But to be fair, it’s a masterpiece.
The Horrible Hopping Hindsight is “a most unpleasant fellow whose eyes were in the rear and whose rear was out in front. He … never cared where he was going as long as he knew why he shouldn’t have gone to where he’d been.”
This is a key reason 55 percent of employeesreport that annual performance reviews fail to improve their performance. Managers and employees can’t course correct if they only identify a dysfunction eight months after the fact. In today’s competitive labor market, eight days might be too long with regard to some issues.
The good news is that according to Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, agile performance management practices can lead to a 24 percent boost in workforce performance! And platforms like BizRun can make those easy to implement. And Here are the key things you can achieve with an agile performance management system.
#1: A balanced performance management system gives employees a voice
You know the most assertive employees aren’t the only ones with valuable ideas. Now you can engage all employees by making the review process more democratic and soliciting insights through surveys. Questions can be short answer, ranked, multiple choice, Y/N, etc. Answers can even be anonymous—at your discretion, of course.
BizRun’s employee engagement surveys and user-friendly interface allow people at all levels to weigh in on opportunities, voice concerns and discuss their professional development goals. They’re also powered by the same automated workflows available with our process management tools.
#2: Performance management tech delivers more insights in less time, and in a highly organized format
A good HR tech solution facilitates every type of feedback. We have a full set of ready-to-use online evaluation templates for employee-supervisor, peer-to-peer, employee and team, 360-degree, and self-evaluations. While these are super-helpful, you can easily edit them for your unique needs.
Streamlined workflows for information sharing yield insights you can actually use. But at the same time, you don’t want to be overwhelmed with data. BizRun consolidates all responses into a single screen for pain-free review.
Forget spreadsheets. Forget transcribing written feedback. Take it all in at a glance and put it to use.
#3: Automating some aspects of performance management actually makes it more humanistic
Performance management tech eliminates the trade-off between efficiency and nurturing relationships. That’s partially because it eliminates a lot of menial administrative tasks, creating greater freedom for more frequent, balanced and informal employee-manager interactions.
It also makes communication and feedback easier and less formal. Virtual and hybrid workplaces aren’t going away after the pandemic. This makes easy-to-use, cloud-supported platforms all the more advantageous. According to Gallup, team members who receive weekly feedback are over five times as likely to strongly agree that the feedback is meaningful, and 3.2 times as likely to be highly motivated. Our tools make that simple.
The automated workflows that are part of a good human resources information system (HRIS) facilitate real-time feedback and collaboration. When multiple parties are weighing in on a project or an individual’s performance, you’re not wasting time chasing people down with individualized requests and reminders. Our process management tools send automatic reminders, forward forms to the people who need them once they’ve been completed, and include task delegation functions.
Performance management technology can also eliminate rater bias because it delivers cleaner data and more objective information.
Agile performance management is kinder, more inclusive and just more effective.
#4: The “agile” in agile performance management will soon become redundant
There’s a clear business case for flexible, high-utility performance management for various reasons. Gartner reports that it increases workforce performance by 24 percent, employee engagement by 14 percent, and perceived fairness by a whopping 50 percent. It even boosts the proportion of high performers by 7 percent. How much is that worth to your firm?
Forward-focused constructive and practical. Among other features, BizRun’s performance management solution includes:
- Unlimited data storage.
- Flexible, user-friendly interface.
- Cloud supported for easy smartphone and remote use.
You can’t afford to wait weeks—much less months—to address a dysfunction or jump at an opportunity. BizRun’s Performance Management module empowers you to do that, replacing interpersonal stress and inefficiency with harmony and insight.
What’s the bottom-line impact of reducing annual turnover by a modest 15 percent?
Implementing performance management best practices is more urgent—yet easier—than ever.
For feedback to be useful, it has to be specific, behavior-focused and, above all, timely. If performance-related issues—good or bad—are difficult to recognize in real time, or if it just isn’t part of your process, you can’t do anything practical with the information. That’s why performance management tech should be customizable and flexible.
With BizRun’s Performance Management module, you get to do the kind of value-added work that inspired you to go into HR in the first place. It saves heaps of time on menial administrative stuff, increases engagement and contributes to a more employee-centric culture.
And of course, it gives you the tools you need to banish the Horrible Hopping Hindsight.
HR software that simplifies it all
- Eliminate paperwork and spreadsheets
- Boost employee engagement
- Optimize performance management
- Streamline employee onboarding
