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.
- A desire to make the process as efficient and effective as possible.
- 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.