Can Technology Save Your Performance Reviews?

Let’s be honest: The performance review has gotten a bad rap. Not only do employees dread the process, managers often feel the time can simply be better spent doing something else. Unfortunately, while the performance review process is intended to be helpful to everyone, several companies are simply doing away with them.

It may seem like the performance review is dying—but it’s not dead yet.

Despite the negative connotation, reviews are vitally important to the growth and success of employees—and the growth and success of your business. You can change the way employees and managers view the performance review, and essentially revive and simplify the process, by adding HR technology into the mix.

Here are five ways HR tech can save the performance review from an untimely demise at your org:

1. Increase individual accountability for competencies

For starters, being able to easily access and analyze performance data all in one place can help increase individual employee accountability. This is easily done by creating company and employee-specific lists of competencies for skill assessment and succession planning.

Both employees and managers should be able to refer back to those competencies time and time again. Doing so makes it easier for employees to know exactly what they need to know, and for managers to identify, monitor, and develop future leaders. 

2. Eliminate paperwork

Here’s perhaps the most obvious benefit of implementing modern HR technology into the performance review process. Going paperless eliminates the endless stacks of paperwork associated with reviews. Long gone are the days of mulling over (and losing) performance-related paperwork for each employee.

Instead, HR software enables managers to track an employee’s ongoing performance with a single click. Not to mention, you’ll be taking a tiny extra step towards helping the environment. Let's save some trees!

3. Easily track and measure goals

As your company grows, it becomes harder to track and measure individual employee goals. That’s where performance management software comes into play. Software can be hugely beneficial when it comes to communicating and aligning goals.

Employees who have a clear understanding of organizational objectives are able to better tailor their goals to those of the company, and that means everyone wins. Furthermore, being able to track and measure individual goals gives plenty of food for thought for your performance review discussions. See what work employees find the most exciting—and how that helps the company's bottom line.

4. See performance management from every angle

Managers typically only see a small piece of the picture when it comes to employee performance, but what they’re not seeing can be even more telling. Technology is especially useful when it comes to performance management, as it can allow managers to obtain a 360-degree view of an employee’s performance.

360 performance management, as you probably already know, helps facilitate ongoing feedback conversations, solicit peer feedback, and create a competency framework for career development. Then, you can import and export performance-related data to provide managers with a broader perspective on every employee. When dealing with your best people, every angle is important.

5. Support ongoing feedback

Millennials or not, employees want feedback. And yet, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), only two percent of employers provide ongoing feedback to their employees.

Rather than holding on to praise and criticism for the formal performance review, give employees real-time feedback. Automating the performance review process can help managers better supply feedback to employees by incorporating self-ratings, peer review, and manager assessments into the process.

Most importantly, being able to easily track and measure employee performance ensures managers are providing meaningful feedback to their employees. It's those personable conversations—the ones where a manager really has an understanding of how an employee functions in the org—that performance reviews should always be about.

Looking to purchase HR software? Check out HR Advisor George LaRocque's new HR Technology Buyer's Playbook. In which, he covers the 6 things every HR buyer must keep in mind when building a best-in-class tech stack.