7
min read
Read this article to get a comprehensive view (pros, cons, features and pricing) of the best performance management software available in the market today and essentials tips to find the right one
7
min read
Every people-manager understands the importance of having an effective performance management system for individual as well as organizational success. Here, using the right performance management software can help you automate many parts of the process as well as enable you to leverage industry benchmarks and AI driven guidance to drive performance in the right direction.
To help you make an informed choice, we have curated this list of the top 8 performance management tools and a quick guide on how to find the best one for your unique needs.
Did you know that choosing the best performance management software can help you accomplish a variety of objectives, including —
With these benefits in mind, let’s quickly check out the 8 most efficient performance management software for growing organizations.
Now, let us look at all these 8 platforms and learn the pros and cons of each.
Next-gen talent management platform suitable for collaborative, comprehensive and regular performance reviews, tracking and real time feedback to facilitate high performance culture. SuperBeings comes with integrated OKR management and employee engagement modules.
SuperBeings is priced at a nominal cost of $3.00 per user per month. It is ideal for growing teams which need flexibility of scale and comprehensive functionalities to create a high performance culture.
There is a 21 day free trial available.
People management software focusing on 360 performance review cycles and engagement surveys, OKR tracking and real-time feedback ideal for teams of 40+ members
Performance management with Lattice starts at $8.00 per month for each user with a minimum annual agreement of $4000.
Based on the minimum commitment, Lattice is ideal for team sizes of 50+.
There is no free trial, but a demo can be availed by interested users.
Comprehensive performance management and employee development software with reviews and conversations for managers and employees ideal for companies with 25+ members
The pricing for Culture Amp is available on request. It is ideal for organizations with 25+ employees. This performance management software provides different feature-clusters for different organizations based on their workforce strength and is, thus, ideal for small, medium sized as well as large enterprises.
There is no free trial for Culture Amp. However, there’s a 3 minute pre-recorded demo available on request.
All in one people enablement platform bringing together performance management, employee engagement, and learning ideal for teams of any size
The pricing for Leapsome starts at $6.00 per user per month. There is no minimum commitment, making it suitable for organizations that might be starting up as well as large enterprises.
Leapsome offers a 14 day free trial for users.
Continuous performance management platform which combines software, education, and community to develop successful managers improve employee performance ideal for teams of all sizes
Pricing for 15Five starts at $8.00 per user per month and is ideal for organizations of all sizes. It also has specific capabilities for managers to facilitate performance management starting at $9.00 per manager per month.
Users can sign up for a free trial
New age performance management software redefining appraisals by combining employee engagement and performance reviews ideal for larger corporations with medium sized teams
The pricing starts at a minimal cost of $5000 annually. Therefore, having a critical mass of team members makes sense to use this performance management software.
There is a free demo available.
Personalized Human Resources Information System (HRIS) focused on performance management for small and medium sized organizations
The pricing for BambooHR is available on request based on the number of employees and functionality requirements. It is ideal for organizations of all sizes and has a suite of HR services to offer, which can be of better use to organizations in their scale up phase.
There is an availability of free trial
Intelligent employee listening platform to provide personalized employee experiences and maximize business performance for large organizations
The pricing is available on request. This performance management software is ideal for large organizations and enterprises.
There is no free trial available. But a pre-recorded 2 minute product walk-through is available on request
If you are wondering how to find the right performance management software or how to make a decision from the many options shared above, you need to ask yourself a few questions:
Start by gauging where you are struggling and what are the problems that you seek to solve with the performance management software. The idea is to enlist all your pain points and intended impact.
Once you have your pain points, you will have a clear picture of what you need. Do you only need performance review capabilities or do you also need support with goal management as well as feedback. These considerations are crucial for you to make the right choices.
(Keep reading to learn the key features of top performance management tools)
Next, you need to gauge your financial situation to decide how much you are willing to spend. While there will be pricing for performance management software available, you will first need to have clarity on your budget. Learn about the possible return on investment before you commit to a software.
Read ROI of Performance Management Tools to make a proper business case
In addition to the budget, you also need to figure out the number of people who will be using the performance management software, now and in the future. If you are a growing organization, you need to be cognizant of your scale up plan as well. While some performance management software are ideal only for large enterprises, others have solutions for the entire spectrum with flexible pricing.
Finally, you need to consider whether simply gathering reviews and feedback is enough or would you need insights, reports, heatmaps, etc. as well to make sense of your data points. More often than not, having such features and integrations are integral to performance management and thus, this consideration can make a lot of difference.
Based on answers of these questions, you need to look for some features that are mostly non-negotiable if you want to leverage your performance management software to the maximum extent, including:
A key aspect of any performance management software is its ability to assist growing organizations and team members in goal management. There are multiple connotations at play here:
The right performance management software will enable you to set, align and manage goals seamlessly to contribute to high levels of performance resulting from achievement of goals and OKRs.
Performance tracking and 360 review are very important aspects of a performance management software. Especially for fast growing organizations, it is important to track progress and performance in real time to:
However, simply focusing on real time tracking is not enough. Performance reviews as a part of the performance management software must also be comprehensive and holistic in nature. This requires a focus on 360 performance review to ensure:
Thus, the right performance management tools will enable you to frequently conduct employee reviews, involving all key stakeholders in a strategic and streamlined manner by leveraging the power of automation. Put simply, the pre-set review templates and surveys can be set automatically using the software with automatic reminders, reducing admin work while augmenting impact at the same time.
Based on performance tracking and reviews, the performance management software should be able to provide you with insights to offer feedback during 1:1 conversations. Some important aspects include:
Additionally, the various integrations of the performance management software should reduce the admin work for managers for scheduling and conducting 1:1 conversations.
The best performance management software should be able to help managers and organizational leadership ensure frequent and meaningful recognition and appreciation. This generally requires:
Therefore, a performance management software must provide insights into these and more aspects of appraisal and recognition. The objective is to enable managers to reward high levels of performance consistently to facilitate motivation and at the same time, identify and address blockers to performance, if any.
Finally, the performance management software should have robust reporting and analytics capabilities. Simply conducting reviews, feedback, etc. will not bear fruit, if managers are not able to drive change with the results. Therefore, the performance management software should:
Thus, reporting and analytics can be a culmination of all performance management efforts as well as the starting points on new priorities and areas of work. Without holistic but crisp reporting, a performance management software might not be able to provide complete insights into the performance culture for an organization.
In a performance management software, you should look out for the feature of performance snapshots to ensure bias free performance management with feedback captured at regular intervals. Your platform should:
Good performance management tools can help you capture performance snapshots across an automated 9 box exercise and track improvement over time.
For performance management to be truly effective, your managers need to be trained on providing the right coaching to employees in a strategic manner. This not only enables them to provide feedback holistically but also have 1:1 conversations with employees in the right way. A performance management tool can help this by providing coaching support to managers by:
Thus, you must look out for a performance management system which can provide adequate coaching to your managers to help employees navigate their performance in the right direction.
A performance management tool that comes with a feature of talent profiles or personality assessment is important for any growing organization. It can help you understand the strengths, skills and other important aspects of your team members and identify gaps if any. The right tool will enable you to:
Therefore, the right performance management tools will help you build talent profiles not only prepares you for better performance in the present, but ensures that you are set for the future too.
Ensuring the right skills and competencies are borne by each employee is an integral part of performance management. Thus, if your tool is able to facilitate this, you will find yourself in a position of success. A good performance management software can help you:
In a nutshell, the tool will be able to help you draw a blueprint for your organization’s learning and development based on competency management.
In conclusion, it is evident that most of the performance management software available in the market today can help you transform your performance management process for the better. However, choosing a software based on its capabilities may not be enough. You need to gauge whether or not it is ideal for your organizational size and type too as well as measure its ROI before committing your resources to any particular software. Use the factors shared above for an informed purchase of your performance management software.
If interested, book a free trial with SuperBeings today. No credit card required.
ROI of performance management software
If you are trying to design a continuous and comprehensive performance management system, you would know the importance of conducting a 360 degree feedback. However, to make this exercise most effective, you need to go beyond simply involving everyone in the process to getting the process right — most importantly asking the right feedback questions to each stakeholder. This article will focus on how to write 360 feedback questions that create maximum organizational impact.
Let us quickly start by understanding what you must include in your 360 feedback questions to make it more effective.
Read: How and when to conduct 360 degree feedback
Without wasting any time, let’s dive into the 10 tips that can help you in writing excellent and effective 360 feedback questions.
Keep the language easy to understand and avoid using technical jargon. Make sure everyone is able to gauge the same meaning of the question and the focus is not lost in translation.
Keep adding the questions list for your next 360 degree feedback to your records throughout the year.
Since 360 feedback should focus on all aspects of an employee, if you add questions at different times, they will be more relevant
Ensure that the questions don’t have an inherent bias or don’t push or influence the respondent to answer in a specific manner. Make sure that the questions can have varied options as answers and not a singular focus because that’s what you want as a result. Furthermore, the questions should not create a bias in the mind of the reader of any kind.
Focus on one specific attribute or competency for each question. Don’t try to include everything in a single question to keep the number of 360 feedback questions low. You will end up receiving responses for only a part of the question and it will confuse the respondent too. For instance, if you want to talk about collaboration, do not couple it with factors like leadership skills or problem solving.
Before you start framing the questions, identify the key competencies that are most important for your organization as well as the role. Competencies could include communication, innovation, strategic thinking, etc.
Make sure that as a whole, all the questions cover all aspects you want to gauge the employee on from an organizational and functional role perspective. However, don’t overstuff too many competencies, keep them relevant to the employee in question. For instance, a person in sales may not need a question on technology knowledge as a part of 360 feedback questions.
In addition to being specific, be clear on what you wish to gauge or understand with every question you ask. For instance, a question on whether or not the employee pays heed to the opinion of others can help understand the level of active listening and a spirit of inclusion.
You need to have a fair balance between open ended and close ended questions.
A very long or complicated process is likely to reduce participation and defeat the purpose. Therefore, keep the count of 360 feedback questions to a maximum of 30-40 and make it very easy to participate and complete the same. Preferably, disseminate it through your existing communication/ collaboration tools.
Finally, make sure that the questions are framed in a way that is simple to evaluate. Too complex evaluations might take too much time and delay the action and execution, leading to reduced faith and impact on 360 degree feedback.
To ensure that your questions are relevant and specific, you can start with writing 360 feedback questions for different situations and contexts. Put simply, in this section, we will focus on what you should be asking and when. It will also help you in picking the right questions for the right employees, instead of bombarding everyone with the same questions.
These questions will help you understand what your team members think about the overall management at your organization and the effectiveness of specific team leadership.
These questions can help you understand the level of communication efficiency in your organization to ensure there is no gap between intention and execution.
Use these questions to identify and nurture employees that show leadership potential to build an effective succession pipeline.
These questions can help you understand how committed your employees are towards the organization, which will impact their level of engagement and quality of work.
You can leverage these questions when you wish to understand which employees are quick to think on their feet and will be able to address problems/ challenges that might come their way.
These questions can help you gauge the level of alignment between what your organization stands for and the core values/ beliefs of your employees.
Read: Strategic goal alignment: How to align team and organizational goals
Focus on these questions when you want to understand how well your employees are able to connect with their peers and other stakeholders.
These final set of questions can help you gauge how efficiently the employees are able to get work done. This points to the presence of the right skills to utilize resources in the best way possible.
To keep the entire survey with 360 degree feedback questions interesting and engaging, you can experiment with different question formats and templates. While some of your questions can have simple Yes/No answers, some can have multiple choices along with room for providing open ended answers as well. Here is an easy to follow template you can leverage.
Key competency: Strategic decision making
Top line: The employee/ subject name is able to
Attributes:
Spectrum
Open ended questions
Once you roll out the survey with your 360 feedback questions and receive the answers, you need to analyze the responses to come up with a final report and plan of action. However, any response analysis is subject to biases and other factors which might put the validity and reliability of the report into question. Fortunately, you can leverage these following practices to eliminate such instances:
Before concluding this article, we would like to discuss the top 8 questions that most managers have when it comes to 360 degree feedback, highlighting concerns they may be having.
Highlight how the performance and feedback on the performance of others is likely to have an impact on their performance too. Make them believe they can be an integral part of the growth journey for their team members.
Make the feedback anonymous to prevent sugar coating. At the same time, do not rely upon a single review as the ultimate feedback for any employee. Analyze at least 2-3 feedback responses for each employee to get the real picture.
3. How to make the process time effective?
Leverage technology platforms to roll out the surveys and collect responses. Furthermore, you can rely on the NLP sentiment analysis to gauge insights from open ended questions in addition to trend generation based on quantitative questions.
Check out how SuperBeings can help you conduct seamless 360 degree feedback. Book a free demo today
Highlight the positive impact of participation as a whole. Make it an interesting part of the employee lifecycle. Provide employees designated time within their work schedule to provide feedback. Do not make it an added burden. Additionally, keep the process simple with not a lot of questions at once.
Depending on the nature of the organization you can decide on the level of anonymity. Facilitate anonymity will help you fetch greater and more authentic responses. However, sometimes, you might struggle with context in this case. Therefore, you should adopt an approach of flexible/ partial anonymity.
Create a business case for 360 degree feedback. Illustrate how it can lead to a better employee experience, strategic learning and development, greater employee retention and other aspects which can lead to better performance and productivity.
Ensure that your questions are neutral and don’t lead to a specific sentiment or response. For instance, if you want to gauge punctuality for an employee, don’t use statements like do you think the employee is always late to work, rather focus on how would you rate the punctuality and sense of time for the employee?
Try to conduct 360 feedback on a regular basis and not wait for the end of the year to ask all the questions. Maintain a cadence to gauge responses.
As we end this discussion, it is clear that if you want to write 360 feedback questions in an effective way — you need to adopt an all encompassing approach, taking into account the different aspects of employee attributes, performance, personality and behavior.
It is, therefore, ideal to leverage platforms like SuperBeings to help you roll out, gather and analyze the responses using NLP and automation for best results. You can leverage our best practices to not only get the questions right but to also enable your managers to facilitate employee development at the end of the process.
If interested, feel free to book a demo today. No initial commitment required.
How and when to conduct 360 degree feedback
In the recent years, there has been a lot of attention that is being given to employee feedback, performance reviews and evaluation as a part of the whole performance management system.
While a major focus has been to prepare managers to give feedback in a constructive and effective manner, paying attention to employee self evaluation is equally important. Knowing what self appraisal comments to use can play a major role in helping employees to effectively reflect and evaluate their performance and convey it effectively to the rest of the team.
The purposes of employee evaluation and performance review in general have been talked about time and again. However, self appraisal takes the process of evaluation at a very personal and individual level, leading to a more pronounced understanding of an employee’s performance. Some of the top benefits of employee self assessment include:
Read: Employee self assessment: How to write a great one
In the section above, we have talked about the purpose or the need of self evaluation mostly from the perspective of the employee. However, self appraisal, when done correctly, has equally compelling benefits for the team as well as managers. A quick snapshot is captured below:
With self appraisal, employees become active participants in their review and appraisal process, rather than simply being passive recipients. Consequently, they feel valued, motivated and the level of engagement increases. Furthermore, with greater engagement, levels of commitment, retention and productivity go up.
When employees take a step back to reflect on their performance with self appraisal, they become more receptive to diverse ideas. Put simply, in the absence of self reflection, they will have a hard time gauging where they need to improve. Consequently, they will be defensive when a manager or the team gives them feedback on the same. However, self evaluation will help them accept the gaps and be open to learning and growing.
When employees reflect on their performance and identify the development areas, they will don a problem solving hat on to accelerate their professional journey. Through the course of time, this problem solving attribute will become a part of their skill set which will benefit the team and the manager greatly.
As a result of greater alignment due to self reflection on the strengths and areas of development, teams will see a greater sense of accountability to bridge the gaps identified. Under conventional circumstances, performance improvement might be seen as just a tick in the box by employees. However, after self appraisal, employees truly acknowledge and accept the need to bridge those gaps and take greater ownership and accountability.
Now that you have an understanding of why self appraisal matters, let’s quickly look at how to make it most effective. If you are experimenting with self evaluation for the first time, it can be an overwhelming activity for your employees. It is human nature to feel uneasy when you’re expected to evaluate your own performance. However, if you provide your employees with some comments they can use for self evaluation as a starting point, you can make the journey easier for them.
Put simply, self appraisal comments are common statements that can be customized by your employees during the self evaluation process, especially, if they find themselves at a loss of words to describe their performance
These phrases are available for both strengths and areas of development to help employees paint a realistic picture of their performance. Here are the top 100 self appraisal phrases that you can use for different performance parameters.
Use these self phrases to reflect on your clarity of communication, willingness to listen to others, etc.
These self evaluation phrases reflect how reliable or dependable you are for your team members, especially under special circumstances.
Using these self appraisal phrases can help indicate how invested or engaged you are in taking ownership of work without being asked to at times.
Similar Read: 150+ performance review phrases for managers
The following self appraisal comments are important to help review your performance on the basis of how punctual and attentive you are.
Use these self evaluation phrases when you want to highlight your strengths/ areas of improvement of working with the team, your collaboration skills, etc.
Creativity self appraisal comments can help you in reflecting on how effectively you are able to come up with novel and innovative solutions to challenges and new ideas to augment the impact and value created.
The following phrase can create a picture of your quality of work and how much attention you pay while undertaking a particular task during your self reflection process.
You can use these self appraisal comments to illustrate how well you understand what is expected out of you and how well you are able to deliver on the same.
Customer satisfaction self evaluation performance phrases help gauge how effectively you are able to address customer requests or complaints that leads to a higher Net Promoter Score, brand credibility, etc.
Finally, these self-appraisal comments can help you highlight your growth plans towards your professional development and impact on the organization.
With a broad understanding of the more than 100+ self appraisal comments that you can use as a part of your self evaluation process, let’s move to this concluding section. Here, we will focus on sharing a few templates that employees can use to articulate their performance in an effective manner.
The self evaluation phrases mentioned above can be added at the right places in these templates to give a holistic picture of one’s performance. A few things to focus on include:
In the last <performance period>, I have successfully <activity/ initiative undertaken> which led to <tangible impact (metrics)> for the organization.
My focus was on <a detailed view of everything that was done> which resulted in <accomplishments>.
Overall, I believe that I have been able to create an impact by achieving <top 3 achievements> and seek to amplify the same in the future.
I believe that the last <performance period> has been full of learning and development for me.
While I was able to <quick snapshot of achievements>, I acknowledge that I need to pay attention to <areas of improvement>.
I believe that this focus will help me <intended outcome for improvement>.
Towards this, I will ensure that I consistently work towards <improvement plan (courses, behavioral changes)> to achieve <SMART goal>.
That said, self appraisal is an extremely crucial step of performance review. As a manager you must encourage your team members to provide honest reflection on their performance without being afraid of any negative consequences. Apart from providing the self appraisal comments mentioned above, you can also use assessment tools to make self appraisal a common practice within the organization.
Custom Pulse Surveys by SuperBeings can help you with understanding their needs and help you support them better. If interested, book a free demo today.
Employee Self Assessment: How to write a great one
150+ performance review phrases for managers
How to use custom pulse surveys to enhance employee experience
Holistic performance reviews are integral for any organization that seeks to create a high performance culture. However, the nature of performance appraisals has undergone significant transformation with a focus on 360 feedback and review.
One of the key pillars for the same is employee self assessment and self appraisal. Through the course of this article, we will share with you why self assessment is important and how you, as a manager, can help your employees get it right to facilitate maximum impact.
As the name suggests, employee self assessment or self reflection is the practice or process where employees reflect on and assess their performance over a period of time to identify accomplishments, development areas and other performance aspects
The aim of self assessment is to get the employees’ view of their performance and add the information and data to manager and peer feedback. This can enable organizations to get a holistic understanding of the employee performance and gauge the overall contribution, some of which might be invisible from a macro view. Here are a few reasons why employee self assessment as a tool for performance review makes sense for growing organization:
With the rise of continuous performance management and regular review and appraisal, your self assessment process should follow a similar approach.
Instead of pushing employees to assess and reflect on their performance at the end of the year, you should encourage them to conduct regular self assessment
On one hand, regular and continuous performance linked self appraisal by employees will ensure that no part of their performance goes unnoticed. On the other hand, it will constantly give them a chance to reflect on their performance and improve on the development areas on the go, instead of waiting for the year end. Invariably, they will embark on the path of development and improvement at an accelerated pace.
Here, if you leverage employee pulse surveys which are short and frequent in nature, you can ensure consistent and continuous self reflection from employees. With as frequent as one question a day, you can encourage your employees to build a culture of performance-oriented self assessment.
With self assessment and reflection being a fairly new practice to performance management, many organizations and employees struggle with getting it right.
While some believe that employees might see it as a chance to explain their bad performance, others believe that it might end up biasing the manager’s perspective.
However, when done right, employee self assessment can be an extremely powerful tool to facilitate a high performance culture. Here are a few tips to get your employees conduct performance self assessment the right way:
Encourage your employees to be open and honest. Employees must not see self assessment as a place for self aggrandizing in the hope of a better rating, rather an honest assessment of one’s performance.
For self evaluation to be effective, your employees need to reflect on their performance without the worry of being penalized for identifying areas of development and improvement
It is important to not see self assessment as the sole foundation for promotions and appraisals, but rather as a journey towards growth.
Next, persuade your employees to reflect on their OKR performance. The idea is not only to assess what has been achieved with OKR grading. It should also include reflections from OKRs about the possible enablers and blockers to further refine them for the next performance period. The employee must be guided to reflect on what helped achieve the OKRs and what other support is required as well as what he or she would personally like to work towards.
Download: Free OKR grading template
Third, when self assessing for performance review, employees must incorporate feedback from their conversations with managers and peers. If your organization has a culture of regular 1:1s, this will be very easy for your workforce. The idea here is to motivate your employees to reflect on what feedback they have been able to gauge and whether or not according to them their performance is a reflection of the same. 360 degree feedback can also be a helpful tool for employees to understand all aspects of their performance.
Factors like what did the manager praise about their performance or what did a coworker thank them for are very important for self assessment.
Read: Top 50 1:1 meeting questions for great managers
Finally, as a part of performance review self assessment, employees need to reflect on the challenges and opportunities, both internal and external. Internally, they need to assess their attributes, skill sets and aspirations and align them with the expectations to gauge their level of performance. Similarly, external factors like resources, team support and their impact on performance needs to be documented.
When you share these above mentioned tips with your team members, they are bound to ask questions about the best practices for writing or filling up self assessment surveys in the most effective way. We have you covered for that as well. Here are a few quick tips to help your employees write effective self assessment:
Read: How to go from performance management to employee development
If you look at these best practices closely, you will realize that the key to writing effective self assessment also lies in the questions that you ask.
Simply asking an open ended question like reflecting on your performance will seldom yield any substantial responses, mainly because your team members will struggle with starting their answers
Therefore, we have compiled a list of questions and potential answer prompts/ templates to help you make self assessment a part of your performance review process effectively.
Also read: 150+ useful performance review phrases to start using today
Ensuring impact with self assessment is not only dependent on your team members. There are several ways in which managers of an organization can help build a culture of effective self evaluation.
Create an open culture where employee self reflection does not become the sole tool to penalize or promote employees, see it as an extended glimpse of performance
As we come to an end, it is clear that employee self assessments are an integral part of performance reviews and if conducted in the right manner have the potential to drive a high performing culture. However, we understand that administering and facilitating participation for self assessment can be daunting, especially for a growing organization.
Fortunately, custom pulse surveys by SuperBeings with automated sending and reminders, along with NLP based sentiment analysis can take care of the same for you. If interested, book a free demo today to learn more.
How to use custom pulse surveys to enhance employee experience