How To Choose Performance Management Software

One of the foundational ideas behind modern performance management is digital systems. The frequency and complexity becomes too big of a distraction unless it can be automated away with software.

All the recent performance management transformations, like Adobe, Deloitte and GE have been enabled by technology running in the background.

If you are designing a modern performance management system for your organization, you should also be considering performance management software.

Here is what you should be looking for.

What Is Performance Management Software?

This software enhances organizations' performance by driving employee productivity. It ensures that teams and individual employees are aligned with the organization's goals.

A performance management system essentially eliminates the annual employee review process. Instead, it promotes high-quality real-time feedback, performance tracking, and goal setting.

In other words, the system does what tedious annual reviews cannot do. It enables businesses to adjust employees' goals as business conditions change.

Put another way, annual reviews focus too much on the past, while performance management systems focus on future needs.

Just as human resource departments handle annual reviews, they oversee performance management systems. This includes teaching employees and managers how to use them.

Software Goals and Features

Well-designed performance management systems are aimed at keeping your employees engaged and motivated. The more energetic they are, the higher your organization's daily output will be.

Ultimately, this helps to reduce staff turnover. It also boosts productivity and enhances operational efficiency. In other words, these systems tie performance into a business's bottom line.

What to Look for in Software

Want a performance management system to work for you? Your organization must promote constant communication between managers and employees.

After all, a major feature of today's performance software is 360-degree feedback. This feedback includes input from not only employees' supervisors but also subordinates and peers.

Effective software also interacts with workforce analytics. In this way, you can easily analyze data. Then, you can compare this information with the data you receive from sales performance and financial management systems.

The Present and the Future

Performance management systems use live dashboards for collaborative and quick reviews.

In addition, they can report individual-, team- and project-level performance. Today's systems can also provide helpful employee rankings.

The future of these systems appears to be bright, too, given the improvements that have been made in artificial intelligence.

For instance, many studies have reported that gender bias is a major problem for female workers during performance reviews. However, artificial intelligence-enabled tools that can detect bias in language patterns are already being used in recruiting software.

Work Standard Consistency Benefit

Performance management systems offer multiple benefits. One of them is that they can help employees' work standards to remain consistent.

A performance management system maintains a collection of human resource data. It then follows an established protocol for feedback, reviews, transfers, and promotions.

As a result, you don't have to worry about discrepancies in your company's work practices.

This makes your organization appear more credible, thus leading to a more ethical and better company culture.

Personal Development Benefit

With a performance management system, your organization can promote personal growth and career development more effectively.

The software provides a forum for your company's senior management to create, monitor and update workers' personal development plans.

Of course, the goal here is to give workers strong autonomy and control when it comes to their career paths.

A personal development plan assesses a worker's current skills and charts out his or her development route.

The development plan also allows for training sessions. This is because training helps to uplift the whole workforce's competency levels. This enables the organization to keep moving on a trajectory focused on high growth.

Flexibility Benefit

Employees generally appreciate independence, not micromanaging.

This is why performance management software is so invaluable. It automates routine human resource jobs to give your entire workforce more flexibility and freedom.

The freer your workers feel, the more motivated they will be to do their best and to be innovative. Also, the more confident they will be in their individual job roles.

Goal Setting Benefit

Employees can't be engaged unless they understand how they contribute to meeting their organization's goals.

This is why your workers need to have definite goals they can stay focused on achieving.

Fortunately, performance management systems enhance the company's goal-setting process. How? By taking advantage of the increased communication taking place among all management levels.

As soon as a worker has clear objectives, he or she can plan his or her target path. The employee can then use relevant business resources to achieve his or her goals.

How We Can Help

Want your company to be successful? Your workers must understand their objectives. They must also receive helpful guidance and stay invested in the organization's goals.

A performance management system can keep your organization's diverse group of workers as engaged as possible.

That is why we have created PerformYard, a flexible performance management software solution.

We take your requirements seriously. We'll help you to manage your staff's performance in a single place, including handling feedback, reviews, and goals.

In fact, you can see your review process results through various exports and visuals. These tools make it easy for your human resource team to complete the necessary analysis to identify and reward top performers.

We also stand out for offering an automated and streamlined experience.

Most initiatives involving performance management fail because they are inconsistent and clunky. But we remove the unnecessary steps and headaches from your company's process.

In this way, employee and manager participation is painless -- the way it should be.

Get in touch with us to find out more about why hundreds of our unique customers have turned to PerformYard.

Just as we have helped them, we can help you to improve your company's performance and bottom line long term.