Real-time Continuous Employee Feedback Made Easy With AssessTEAM
Up until the start of the 2010s, the long held belief and accepted wisdom in HR was that employee performance assessment should happen yearly, in the form of the annual appraisal. But, in 2013 disruptive research began emerging that was to question the status-quo in employee appraisals.
Not only was it being discovered that employees hated and distrusted annual appraisals, the reliability of the assessment information was being called into question, due to the inherent time lags between actual behaviour and assessment.
It came as no surprise when research from Bersin by Deloitte found that companies who review employees on a quarterly basis generate 31% greater performance returns, and those that review staff on a monthly basis get even better outcomes.
These findings triggered a paradigm shift, which saw the industry start to move away from annual appraisals, into a world where real-time/continuous feedback was to be considered the best practice for performance management.
Companies like Adobe, Dell, Juniper Systems, Microsoft were some of the early trailblazers in adopting real-time feedback, but professional services firms like Deloitte and Accenture soon followed. Before you knew, it companies like Gap and General Electric were also abandoning annual appraisals in favour of continuous feedback.
Still, brilliant as it was, continuous feedback did come with one drawback, that being there was significant, incremental management overhead, in that you could be doing up to 12 reviews a year instead of one.
This incremental management overhead was an important obstacle preventing continuous feedback from having mainstream appeal.
Thankfully, technology has intervened and has delivered a wave of automating, labour saving, cost effective performance management technologies that make continuous real-time feedback effortless and extremely practical.
Starting at around $1 per employee per month, employers can now make use of web-based software that enables cost-effective real-time feedback. There are plenty of continuous feedback tools on the market, one of the best of which is AssessTEAM. What makes this tool so suitable for real-time feedback are it’s high levels of automation and it’s labour-saving features.
For starters, you don’t even have to enter your staff data manually, you can link your Google apps, Office 360, Basecamp, Zoho, Wrike and many other systems to import your team, simple CSV exports from your HRMS system can also be imported.
Using this data, the system will automatically assign goals and performance indicators to your employees. It can do this because the system comes with a library of over 3,000 detailed goals (known as result areas) and 40,000 performance indicators, applicable to every situation. Create your own result areas and performance indicators with ease too.
Once your employees have been set up with goals and performance indicators, you can set up periodic evaluations (weekly, monthly, quarterly) between evaluators and employees very quickly using the labour-saving evaluation control panel. The software supports everything from 360-degree reviews, self evaluations, supervisor evaluations and client feedback evaluations too. A key time-saving feature is being able to cluster evaluations, so if you have 50 employees with the same goals you can set this up in one go by using evaluations by job titles or teams, rather than having to set them up individually.
Having done all this, the system will automatically notify and chase evaluators and employees until all assessments are completed, reducing management overhead. Leaders can sit back and wait for the evaluations to roll in. Software tools like AssessTEAM are making continuous real-time feedback pain free and easy.
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