5 benefits of an online performance management system

It’s that “magical” time of the year – performance review time. Or online performance review time as it should be known! The traditional employee performance reviews have become so unpopular that three major corporations – NAB, Deloitte and Accenture declared they were axing them.

While this makes for a great headline, when you read beyond the title you will find that these firms aren’t actually abandoning employee performance reviews altogether. They are just changing the way they conduct them.

These companies wanted to make sure they were getting optimal results from their performance appraisals. While many big companies are adopting this talent management strategy, this is something businesses of all sizes should consider.

Think about your own performance review system:

• Do you gain quality feedback from performance reports?
• Do your managers and employees both play an active role in the process and use data to support any company performance discussions?
• Does your performance management system actually help the business set future development and performance goals that are aligned with your company goals?

Upgrading your employee performance management process

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, it’s probably time for an upgrade. If you’re still using a paper-based performance management system, it is also likely to be extremely painful for all concerned.

It means someone (probably you) needs to spend a whole heap of time pulling out the paperwork, making appointments and sending out email chasers to managers to get the ball rolling.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it doesn’t have to be painful at all.

Benefits of online performance management systems

Here are 5 ways an online performance management system can help make measurable improvements to your business outcomes.

1. More effective performance reviews

By using an online performance management system, managers can keep a running log of notes on an employee throughout the year. This helps paint a complete picture of the individual’s performance over time – not just the immediate past, as tends to be the case with paper-based performance reviews.

There’s nothing quite so dispiriting for an employee than to have a mistake they made recently become the entire focus of their performance review, despite an otherwise exemplary year.

Plus, it makes manager preparation for performance appraisals so much easier – because the employee data is all there in the system come review time.

Pro tip: Use our performance appraisal template for your performance review process.

2. Increase goal visibility

In too many small businesses, employees are unaware of the company goals and how their own goals are related to them.

By automating the areas around creating, monitoring and measuring performance against corporate goals, your managers can ensure individual goals are pinned to company-wide objectives.

Plus, with better goal tracking, managers can easily stay in touch with employees progress during every phase of goal completion.

This allows managers to provide real-time feedback, positive reinforcements or praise which is key to employee engagement, or offer coaching and mentoring to get employee performance back on track when it matters most.

To gauge employee engagement in your workplace, check out Employment Hero’s list of employee engagement survey questions.

Read more: How to implement OKRs in your business

3. Save time and frustration

Automating performance reviews will undoubtedly save significant amounts of time across the business. While you’ll be freed up from all the tedious paperwork, online performance management software can also minimise the frustration that managers and employees often feel.

Notifications to managers are automated which eliminates the hassle of chasing down managers to complete employee feedback forms. With an online system, everyone can easily log into the system when it’s convenient for them, and workflows ensure that performance review phases are completed in the right order.

Read more: How to streamline employee workflow

4. Self-evaluations for employees

Including employee self-evaluation is an important part of the performance review process.

Rather than simply receiving feedback, actively participating in the process helps employees become more engaged with the review process. But, because of its added complexity, this is one step that’s often overlooked in paper-based systems.

Automating your process eliminates this complexity and delivers real benefits. For instance, having employees self-evaluate allows the manager to view employee performance through their eyes and get the employee’s point of view.

It can also help managers to better understand a team member’s strengths and weaknesses from their own perspective, all of which leads to much more meaningful feedback.

Read more: Using 1:1 meetings to improve team relationships

5. Powerful real-time reporting

When using paper-based reviews, there’s simply no way to tell how the performance management process is progressing across the business. You can’t see how many reviews have been started or completed, so you have to rely on emails and phone calls to chase them up.

Not with an online system!

You and team managers can view real-time reports on each individual review cycle and follow up with participants electronically. This means there’s no need to hunt down incomplete reviews – it’s all done for you.

But more than this, once reviews have been completed, rather than filing them away in a drawer, an online performance management system allows you to access employee data at any time.

So, you’ll be able to monitor the company’s overall progress against employee goals as well as track improvements in employee performance over time.

Find out more about Employment Hero

Looking for online performance management software?

Of course, improving the quality of your performance review system is just one component of building a team of high-performing employees.

With Employment Hero’s online HR software, you can dramatically reduce the time and paperwork associated with the performance review process.

By doing so, you’ll enhance employee engagement and improve the quality of feedback while you free up more of your time to focus on more strategic matters.

For more reading on HR best practices for developing greater employee satisfaction through employee engagement, download our free eBook: How to Keep Employees Engaged.