What are you using for appraisals and performance management? Paper? Spreadsheets? Fax? A tediously formatted document that employees and managers don’t want to use? A makeshift in-house system designed by your IT department as an attempt to solve your appraisal nightmares? Nothing at all? Any of these answers wouldn’t surprise us.
Our close contact with HR professionals gives us access to plenty of horror stories. And too many of these stories are about outdated (pre-emPerform!) management strategies for appraisals and overall performance documents.
We admit we’ve seen some pretty crafty solutions, including meticulously formatted spreadsheet forms with umpteen versions floating around and some very ‘attractive’ and buggy intranet-based IT web forms. Over and over again, we see a focus on executing the process and very little time and focus left over for strategic performance management tasks and analysis. So what are some key indicators that it’s time to ditch your current processes and modernize?
21 Signs You Need emPerform
1. You answered ‘yes’ to any of the questions asked in the first paragraph.
2. You have to sort through mounds of file folders to find old appraisals (or even current ones).
3. Employees are using physical journals for documenting performance milestones or more likely – are not using anything!
4. Managers avoid you in the hall because they know you’re going to remind them once again to get their evaluations done.
5. You have different rating scales being used on different appraisals and then are forced to try to compare results.
6. Your company spends loads of time establishing strategic goals and for some reason, nothing is being translated into employee action.
7. You have no idea who the company stars are and definitely have no way of proving low-performance.
8. Your HR staff and department managers are experiencing communication and data sharing problems.
9. Your current system offers no cross-referencing capability.
10. Your current data just isn’t useful for any type of decision making.
11. Top management is demanding your voice in company decision making and your recommendations and insight into the current performance health of the company.
12. Employees and managers dread appraisals because the task seems tedious and not very valuable.
13. You have no way of using accurate performance metrics as a basis for fair and consistent compensation decisions and neither do managers.
14. Other than their own memory or some post-it notes, managers have no tools for employee goal management, monitoring, feedback assistance, journaling, competency management, or development planning.
15. Your company’s workforce is becoming larger and more spread out geographically, making it difficult to keep appraisals consistent and have them submitted on time.
16. Your competitors have been using an automated performance management system and are dashing ahead.
17. You know you want to start using 360 reviews for performance assessments but you just don’t have the right tools.
18. Having vacant leadership positions is costing your company far too much time and money.
19. You have a hunch that employee engagement is in the red but have no way of proving it.
20. You looked around for software to automate performance management but couldn’t find anything that was fully customizable to your workflows and content, allowed for hosted OR on-premise deployment, was easy-to-use and completely web-based, and had a price that didn’t make you gulp.
21. You want to automate the process of gathering data so that you can focus on analyzing and acting on it.
If you related to any of the points above, it’s time to get emPerform. We know…we get it…and we can help.
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