What Are the Benefits of a Performance Management System and Why We Created One for Ourselves
Yearly performance reviews are a crucial part of a company and its employees’ development strategy – and the same applies here at Proxiad. In the past, we adhered to a practice that’s all so common in small to medium enterprises – using Microsoft Office 365’s Excel for performance management. This may be an acceptable solution for a while, but when a company starts growing both in terms of employees and years on the market, it could get tricky to keep track of all these documents.
We saw this as an issue. Both management and our People & Culture team were looking for ways to improve the process, decrease the workload of performance reviews, and create a transparent, relevant solution for goal setting.
That’s how GROW was born.
In 2020, we assembled a team of developers who started working on what was called ‘Appraisal’ at the time. Together with our Business Development department, People & Culture team, and a couple of project managers, they fleshed out the idea of this solution for a performance review system and what it should contain. Then a talented team of developers guided by one of our most senior Java engineers began the actual development process – the system was built on Java, Spring Boot и ReactJS. We connected it to our internal communication platform, Office 365 platform, Azure AD, and voilà! The system started functioning.
With time, we realized that we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just end-of-year reviews: the software we built could be used for so much more. We considered the needs of not just those who were reviewing but those who were being reviewed and included functionalities to nurture the professional development of our teammates.
Of course, we knew that we weren’t the only company that needed a performance management system that was made specifically for SMEs. 2021 was the year in which GROW became a software solution we could offer to clients.
So what benefits does GROW bring?
- It facilitates the performance management cycle and limits the loss of information for years to come – Remember those Excel files we mentioned in the beginning? The more an employee stays at a company, the more performance reviews pile up until one is inevitably lost. Performance management systems like GROW store all historical data centrally which means that not only can it not be lost, but it’s easily accessible by both management and employees. And of course, there’s the huge bonus of not having to update files manually every year!
- GROW helps both sides track and maintain personal development – our solution has a special focus on employees’ personal development, as this is an important part of the employee experience here at Proxiad. It helps provide scope and opportunity for incentives, rewards, performance and career development, as well as keep track of the employee’s progress over the years. Based on input from the employees themselves, our performance management system records all the information dedicated to their training and development needs.
- You can set clear, transparent metrics on a personal or company level – GROW lets you manage and track the whole employee evaluation cycle, with short-term and long-term goals in mind. It lets HR managers and reviewers set custom goals for each employee, goals that need to be achieved by every person in the company or a mix of the two. It also provides employees the opportunity to give feedback about their goals and metrics, which could then be changed to better suit their position.
- It helps companies improve and measure employee engagement – Employee engagement is a metric that’s often neglected but it couldn’t be more important now that most of us work remotely. With GROW, you can customize goals to better fit your vision for employee engagement on a company level – for example by including an organizational goal for volunteering or participating in employer branding initiatives.
- Your People/HR team will have an easier time administrating the process – whether it’s a specific person you’ll be looking into or the organization as a whole, GROW provides reports with summaries and historical data that give you a clear overview of your progress. 6.
- It lets employees log in with Single Sign-On – Need to make a quick check without going through hoops to sign in? No problem. Not only is GROW integrated with Office 365, but it also supports SSO and lets you access the solution in a matter of seconds.
To sum it up, a performance management system like GROW could help companies streamline their employee appraisal process, improve the communication between team leads and employees when it comes to their evaluations, and make appraisals a fair, transparent process.
If you want to know more about GROW and how it can help your company seamlessly organize performance management for your employees, head to our PMS’ product page where you can book a demo with someone on our team.
