What is Performance Management Software (and why you need it)?

Corporate goals are ever changing. Whether they’re created to grow revenue, expand operations, or increase market share, company goals are designed to drive the business forward. In order to get there, your people -- the backbone of any company -- need a plan and ongoing support.

That’s where performance management comes into play. Employee performance management, otherwise known as “appraisals,” is a fundamental part of business operations. It’s not just about reviews -- a comprehensive performance management strategy is essential in facilitating alignment, communicating objectives, and ensuring results.

Despite the case for a performance management strategy, companies are struggling.

According to Gartner, 82% of HR leaders agree that their current evaluation practices are ineffective. Sixty-seven percent of these organizations want to reduce the time and energy spent on managing their employees.

Feeling overwhelmed or uncertain by your current appraisals program? Software can help. Below, we explain what performance management software is and how it can benefit your business.

What is Performance Management Software

At its core, performance management software is technology designed to implement, track, and evaluate employee performance at an organization.

There’s a common misconception that performance management is just about evaluations or reviews. In reality, it encompasses much more than that. Like most business initiatives, performance management is quite holistic and embodies the entire employee lifecycle, affecting every part of a company, its initiatives, and its stakeholders.

With so many moving parts, performance management can get complicated. But that’s where software can help simplify and streamline processes. Including:

• Onboarding
• Salary and compensation
• Employee engagement
• Education and professional development
• Goal-tracking and evaluation

With a tool to account for all of these components, managers and business leaders have everything they need to set and exceed expectations.

3 Things to Look For In Performance Management Software

Your performance management software should work for you. When shopping for software options, consider platforms that can do the following:

1. Streamline and centralize all of your workforce data

Considering how many different business operations go into running an organization, people data is notoriously siloed. This hinders performance management: managers are left toggling through different platforms and datasets to create performance plans, set goals, and track progress. It’s time-consuming and inefficient.

ChartHop's integrates with your HR tech stack, serving as your org's source of truth for its people data.

With a performance management software like ChartHop, data is integrated from disparate HR systems and centralized in one platform. Rather than adding another platform to figure out and toggle through, users can access all of their performance-related information, like salary, OKRs/KPIs, and engagement levels, in a single, secure place.

For managers and business leaders, this is especially helpful for supporting employees. Rather than just seeing if someone has completed their objectives or not, managers can take a deep dive into other datasets for a more comprehensive and personal understanding of their people.

For example, say a hiring manager is advocating for an employee’s promotion. With ChartHop, they can see everything their employee has accomplished in their tenure -- not just what goals have been hit, but professional development courses completed, engagement levels, qualitative feedback over time, and in-house awards for outstanding performance. Using this information, a manager can better advocate for their employee and secure that promotion.

Ultimately, this access to data unlocks better insights for better management all around. With ChartHop, leaders have all the information they need to have honest conversations, stronger calibration meetings, and more informed reviews.

2. Fuel strategic decision making

Effective performance management starts with a data-informed approach.

Why? Rather than making decisions blindly, looking at data, metrics, and trends can help optimize evaluation strategies to drive success.

ChartHop supports custom data collection and reporting for performance management.

Performance management software like ChartHop leverages robust reporting tools that allow business leaders to leverage analytics as a catalyst for change. At the organizational level, executives and other business leaders can quickly see how performance management is working as a whole.

With ChartHop, leaders can dive deep into what’s driving org-wide performance trends to identify what’s working and what’s not. As data is integrated from pre-existing HR stacks, leaders gain granular insights into how parts of the business might be affecting one another to improve operations.

People succeed when they’re set up for success.

At the employee level, hiring managers can make better decisions to lead and support their teams. With ChartHop, hiring managers can:

• Develop comprehensive onboarding plans with 30/60/90-day goals that enable employees to hit the ground running.
• Access personalized “About Me” profiles to see personal working styles, communication preferences, and personality types, allowing managers to tailor their management styles to individuals as needed.
• Share customized performance plans with OKRs and KPIs that align directly with the job description, teams goals, and overall corporate mission.
• Run reports and track individual performance to show employees how they’re contributing to the team and identify areas for improvement.

With an arsenal of insights at the organizational and individual levels, your people can work with confidence.

3. Align employees across the organization

When it comes to performance management, you can’t just “set it and forget it.” As business needs change and objectives evolve, everyone needs a reliable resource to understand the dynamic nature of the organization, including where the company is headed and how they can help.

Performance management software like ChartHop fuels alignment and org-wide adoption, so every stakeholder can access and understand how their role impacts the bigger picture.

With the org chart your employees have the context they need to do their job while building culture and fostering connections.

To start, ChartHop allows leaders to create and share an interactive org chart that visualizes company operations. For performance management purposes, this includes data like OKRs/KPIs, 30/60/90 day plans, job descriptions, reporting structures, benefits/salary, training completion rates, and more. Depending on permission controls -- which can be set by administrators based on access levels -- users can find the information they need, when they need it.

From there, this org chart acts as a self-serve resource employees can turn to for all their performance management needs.

Your people are dynamic, and your people systems should be too. When goals change, people need a means to communicate and accommodate that information. In just a few simple clicks, workers can see their personalized performance plans, reporting structures, and team goals, all in one place.

Even for hosting continuous reviews, which are now becoming more popular than traditional annual evaluations, teams have a way to quickly modify objectives, create 1:1 meeting forms, customize evaluation templates, document feedback, and more. This level of agility and accessibility keeps everyone on track to success, no matter how corporate missions change.

Beyond Reviews for Better Results

Performance management is so much more than reviews -- it’s an organizational initiative that spans a business’s entire operations and its stakeholders to drive progress and productivity.

While it seems complicated, a powerful platform can help simplify the intricacies that go into developing a comprehensive performance management strategy. Especially as goals shift -- which they inevitably will -- having a tool to plan for change, communicate strategies, and track how everyone contributes to the overall corporate mission can give your organization a competitive edge.