House of Comms overhauls performance reviews and achieves 90% participation

You’ve just finished a mid-year review and your carpal tunnel is likely still flaring. And with your health and sanity on the line you vow to not do it again, manually.

We get that.

We’ve seen all the different flavors of homegrown performance review processes. A mixed bag of Google Docs, Excel files, and countless emails. Not only is this time consuming to setup and collate, it’s hard to get people to actually complete it. Does this sound familiar?

Take comfort in the fact that you are not alone and that it’s not too late to make a change.

Tom Sealey, Lead Data Scientist and buyer at our newest customer, House of Comms, recently walked us through how they went from evaluating tools to completing their first successful review in Impraise in less than a month!

Want to know what criteria they considered and advice they have for those shopping for a new performance management solution?

We’ve got all the juicy details below.

Who is House of Comms and what were they looking for?

House of Comms is a full-service, strategic marketing and communications agency founded in the UAE. With 68 people today they have plans to significantly grow their digital offering and employee count over the next 6 months. So, they needed a platform and a process that would scale.

The performance management process at House of Comms consists of two 360 performance reviews, one at mid-year and again at the end of the year. The review includes a self-assessment, manager feedback, and pre-selected peer feedback. Historically, process has been managed with Excel spreadsheets sent back and forth by email. We are talking hundreds of emails and 68 spreadsheets to distribute and collate by hand!

While that sounds pretty daunting, there were two primary catalysts for House of Comms.

1. A desire to make the process as efficient and effective as possible.
2. If the review didn’t go out promptly there wouldn’t be enough time to discuss outcomes before pre-planned summer holidays at the management level. With the clock ticking, it was time to take action.

All-in-one is one is appealing but is it right for you?

When evaluating solutions, it's tempting to also want to fix surrounding processes. House of Comms considered revamping their on-boarding and leave management processes alongside performance reviews. They initially landed on a full stack HR cloud solution but realized that the promise of the all-in-one didn’t deliver.

Tom advises others considering an all-in-one solution to watch out for a complex user experience, if the tool is a nightmare to set up it’s likely a nightmare to use. Secondly, make sure it’s easy resolve issues and questions. Coordinating support with an 11 hour time difference is painful. Lastly, be wary of a tool that does a little bit of everything as it’s unlikely that it does all of them well.

Finding the right performance management solution

Determined to find the right solution, House of Comms refined their search criteria and refocused their efforts.

House of Comms’ checklist of considerations:

• Willingness to get on the phone, signal of their availability and support.
• Ability to secure a trial and gather actual user data to evaluate how simple and easy to use the tool was from all perspectives.
• Getting set up with HR best practices.
• Features that track participation and completion metrics and provide a record of feedback and other data over time.
• Ensuring that the tool could reduce the likelihood of human error in distributing, participating, and collating.

With a little bit of research, Tom was able to quickly identify which providers they wanted to review with a new set of criteria. With a demo, trial, and QA session with experts, Tom was excited to move forward with Impraise. He was able to get budget sign-off with a beautifully simple case “If we aren’t willing to spend $7 per user per month to support employee performance, development, and growth, do we have the right priorities as a business?”

House of Comms and Impraise

Working with Kate, House of Comms’ dedicated Impraise account manager and HR specialist, Tom was able to get the mid-year 360 performance review setup and completed on schedule. His efforts paid off, with their first review in Impraise House of Comms achieved a 90% participation rate, exchanged 2,154 pieces of feedback exchanged, and roughly saved 100 hours across the company.

Once the first review was complete we checked in with Tom to better understand House of Comms’ experience with the platform. To cover all bases we discussed both the set up experience and the participant user experience.

Flexible and simple to set up

• Easy to maintain an overview of progress and send extra reminders to people where needed.
• Comforting to know that deadlines could be changed even after the review had been scheduled.
• Looking forward to saving even more time by being able to duplicate this review at the end of the year.
• Excited to experiment with customizing the ratings, questions, and scheduling reviews for teams at a cadence that’s not disruptive.
• Reports were generated automatically and greatly reduced the risk of mixing up results.
• The raw data from the review can easily be extracted and looked at in different ways.

Easy to use

• Automatic notifications reminded our team of what they had to do and how much time they had to get it done.
• People had the option to complete it from the mobile app if they wanted to work on it in transit.
• Impraise doesn’t look like a “classic HR tool” it’s thoughtfully designed and simple to navigate.
• Review reports surfaced alignment and misalignment making follow up conversations between managers and direct reports more focused.

What’s next for House of Comms?

House of Comms has plans to revisit the review questions alongside with the support of Impraise HR experts so they can get even more performance and developmental insights. They also plan to use Impraise to digitize Monthly Prouds, where people share and celebrate achievements and efforts during all hands. Through real-time feedback and light-weight reviews they will be able to get more from these moments by having the praise documented and using this data it to better reward top performers.

Get a head start on modernizing your process

As we head towards end-of-year reviews, the time to start exploring your options is now. Improving your HR processes doesn’t have to be overwhelming, start simple and focus on making improvements in one critical area, like performance reviews.

Learn how performance reviews with Impraise can help you automate and simplify your process to save time and increases participation.