Performance Management, Strategy and Performance, SimpleStrata, Employee Performance, Strategy Execution, Performance Tool | 4 min read
Strategy teams and performance specialists are usually responsible for communicating performance measures to employees and making sure they are reporting their actual achievements on time, in order to generate accurate performance reports.
If you are in one of those positions, then you know for sure how important it is to have dedicated software to help manage this process, rather than doing it manually through Excel sheets which is very time and effort consuming.
Once you’ve determined to start using a software, you will have to evaluate multiple systems to make sure you choose the right solution for the set requirements. In addition, you want to assure that the selected solution will be accepted and adopted by end users.
In this post, I am going to share quick tips that you can use as a guide for evaluating and choosing the right performance management tool thus ensuring you maximize your ROI.
Learn how SimpleStrata can help you manage your organization’s performance in an effective way. Try it now.
To start with, you need to set your requirements clearly. Once you start evaluating different tools from vendors, you may be overwhelmed or misled by the bulk of features and functionalities presented to you, which you may not necessarily need. Unless you have a clear list of requirements, you may be pulled into making wrong purchase decisions.
Refer to the above questions during your product evaluation as they will help you sorting your options and filtering out some of them. In the above context, my recommendation is to try out SimpleStrata, our suggested solution that answers most of the above questions and provide you with maximum flexibility to accommodate adjustments and apply changes as needed, with minimal effort and cost.
Using SimpleStrata, we’ve helped many organizations managing their organizational performance in an effective way while contributing to the adoption of the system through our specialized technology adoption programs.
Learn how SimpleStrata can help you manage your organization’s performance in an effective way. Try it now
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Originally published Jun 12, 2019 1:56:36 PM, updated July 22, 2019
2 min read
You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it!
We sat down with Hanadi Sidawi, product manager of one of our most popular solutions “SimpleStrata” to get to know her more and understand her journey to becoming SimpleStrata’s product manager.
Hanadi graduated from Abu Dhabi University with a degree in computer science and a minor in business administration. Her professional career was kicked off when she became a trainer for basic computer courses. She then shifted into another company, where she worked as a legal assistant for 1 year and then got promoted to senior legal assistant, maintaining that position for 2 more years.
With that kind of experience under her belt, she was able to join Exceed as an HR Coordinator where her focus was on internal policies and labor law compliance in Exceed’s different branches. After some time, the bulk of work was getting more focused on employee performance. To familiarise herself with its methodologies and the system handling it, she began the process of self-teaching and read books to study the main frameworks that formulate the basis of Employee Performance Management and Strategy Execution.
That way, she become proficient in the language that provisions the performance solution that Exceed was developing and was working as a performance specialist implementing the methodology of employee performance in Exceed. As she worked more closely with SimpleStrata, she became proficient in it, which lead the way for her to become the product manager.
By getting more exposed to customers, Hanadi and the team came to know that the challenges that Exceed faced internally were common across almost all organisations from different industries.
Exceed had the methodologies but faced a challenge in communicating, implementing, and executing them the right way, as did the other organisations.
These challenges included:
After the system had reached the desired level of maturity, it was launched in Exceed first then to the market and was able to resolve the 99% of the challenges of many organisations, regardless of their size/industry.
Want to know more about the methodologies behind SimpleStrata?
Click here.
Success Stories
One of our larger customers, SCAMAF (Social Care & Minor Affairs Foundation) were using excel sheets to manually monitor and execute their strategy, which was not only very time-consuming, but it was also exhausting the efforts of employees involved who can be utilising their time in other more efficient tasks. Not only that, but the end result would usually have inaccuracies as human error is guaranteed with repetitive tasks such as this one.
What the SimpleStrata team did was they helped them migrate all their data, which was a huge number of excel files, into the system. They set up the system according to SCAMAF’s execution process, and they provided them with the required training to be able to understand and use the system.
They immediately were satisfied with the system as it had created the perfect environment for them that does not require human intervention. After using the system, they had clear visibility on individual performance as well as organisational performance. Whereas they previously had a full department dedicated to strategy execution, they now had only the Head of Strategy monitoring everything via SimpleStrata.
Statement from the SimpleStrata team:
Since we launched it to the market in 2019, we reduced the time and efforts of 20+ organisations with 3,000 employees across numerous industries: 50% decrease in the time required for collecting performance data & 40% increase in employees’ awareness on their goals and KPIs.
Intrigued? Click here for a FREE trial!
2 min read
KPI reporting can clearly communicate the progress of a company towards its performance goals. Not only the managers can access key results in an instant and transparent manner, but also make informed strategic decisions.
Here are the top benefits of investing in a great KPI reporting tool for your organisation and management.
1. They Let You Measure Results
Measuring is an important part of KPI reporting. It is the primary key that informs you about the success or failure of your work. You need to measure the progress made towards the achievement of your target: the number of sales increased (sales performing), the number of new customers or anything in your business you want to measure.
KPIs provide actionable information because they are always measurable and quantifiable. For example, if one of a hotel company's identified CSFs maintains a high level of occupancy throughout the year, a KPI would be the percentage of occupancy of rooms, measured on a weekly basis, using the previous year as a benchmark.
2. They Help You Set Business Goals
You need to set a target and aim to reach it in a set period. You can set more than one targets and create different keys for each of your targets to ensure you measure your progress and then try to achieve your goals.
It's often difficult to keep all departments or teams within an organisation aligned and working toward common goals. Once an organisation's Mission, Vision and CSFs have been written into a strategic plan, KPIs break down complex information into understandable metrics and provide feedback on the organisation's progress. Communication of progress toward KPIs keeps everyone moving forward in the same direction.
You May Also Like: Guide to the Must-Have KPIs for Service Companies
3. They Offer Incentives to Your Team
KPIs are often linked to incentives. Teams or individuals are offered an incentive to improve their KPIs to a particular level during a specific time period. In order for this to be successful, the KPIs have to be clearly understood and quantifiable, and reporting must be accurate. The information provided by KPIs empowers people to improve their own personal performance along with that of the organisation.
4. They Help Your Find Issues in Your Business Strategy
Managers can use KPI to identify any issues present in the construction of business. Any type of problems such as labor productivity issues, danger to employee safety and failures to meet the expectations and needs of customers. KPI enables businesses to recognise these issues to take appropriate action to rectify these problems. Companies can also resolve customer’s issues and concerns with the help of KPI by analysing feedbacks from clients to check whether the expectations of clients are met or not. This approach also helps in eradicating future potential issues that may occur in the future projects.
4. They Let Your Discover Strengths in Your Strategy
With the KPIs, companies can easily unearth potential strengths to use any opportunities that you can use to enhance the performance of your business. Businesses can easily find the strengths whenever a post-project review shows a high score and this score indicates your performance in your performance. Companies can follow the same procedure to upgrade the performance of their company if your post-project review shows high score.
5. They Align Your Marketing & Sales Efforts
With help of KPIs, companies can easily measure and calculate all efforts that also includes marketing spend and sales department so that all departments can work in a harmonised way. When goals are decided by companies, team members start work in collaboration. This approach brings two departments closer for better insight.
6. They Save Business Expenses
With KPIs, you can easily recognise any cost saving prospects related to the project construction and also craft ways to curb any extra costs that may occur in future. KPI basically include tracking of uncommitted costs and also upsurges committed costs as and when required. Business can easily add factors like contingent costs and price escalation into the committed costs to restrict financial exposure. The knowledge that is gained from the audit can assist companies to manage all labor and material costs when they do bidding for construction in the future.
Are you considering getting your own KPI dashboard?
Try SimpleStrata
SimpleStrata provides a complete solution which enables organisations to communicate and execute their strategy in an effective way, by helping them:
Manage Results
Set goals, objectives, and KPIs
Generate periodic measures
Distribute to employees
Schedule review meetings
Generate results’ scores
Manage efforts
Plan initiatives, projects, jobs
Link to strategy plans
Schedule and assign activities
Monitor progress
Generate efforts’ scores
Create visibility
Define correlations between results and efforts
Generate business intelligence dashboards
Provide insights about corrective actions
3 min read
When speaking of performance management, many think of the annual performance review process. But the annual performance review or appraisal is only a small component of employee performance management.
Employee performance management goes much further than the traditional annual review. It involves regular purposeful interaction between management and employees that is focused on job performance as well as direction and support for the employees.
According to Gallup, organisations that successfully engage their customers and their employees, experience a 240% boost in performance-related business outcomes compared to an organisation without engaged employees or engaged customers.
Performance management defines your interaction with an employee at every step of the way in between these major life cycle occurrences.
According to the definition provided by Michael Armstrong in his Handbook of Performance Management,
“Performance management is the continuous process of improving performance by setting individual and team goals which are aligned to the strategic goals of the organisation, planning performance to achieve the goals, reviewing and assessing progress, and developing the knowledge, skills and abilities of people.”
Note how he mentions that performance management is a continuous process — not an annual event.
A performance manager should, therefore, bring together different, integrated activities to form an ongoing”performance management cycle”. Ideal performance management should make every interaction opportunity with an employee into a learning opportunity.
We have put together some tips for optimising your employee performance management system.
As you develop a performance management program, you need to understand what you want to accomplish from it. Ask the following questions to define your goals:
If you know what you want your program to do, it will be easier to build it to accomplish that goal.
Now that you have set your goals, develop a performance plan to go alongside. Develop short term goals. As long term goals can overwhelm the employees even before they start.
Review employee performance regularly. Use metrics and analytics to track how goals are progressing. This will keep the process transparent and allow you to support your employees, whenever necessary.
During the feedback sessions, tensions can arise if the feedback is not constructive and actionable. It is not very helpful for employee morale to blame and point fingers. Instead performance manager should guide employees towards future success.
Managers should make sure to keep feedback professional and remember to focus on behaviour, rather than characteristics.
Ask employees to provide feedback for each other. This will give the performance manager a more holistic view of employee performance. It will also help them understand the challenges that teams are facing, and be able to better offer feedback.
Related: How to Manage Results vs. Efforts and the Communications Gap - FREE Ebook!
Regular coaching can help identify and solve problems before they get out of hand. Monthly or quarterly meetings should be held to help keep employees on the right track. It also helps to organise cross-functional coaching sessions. This helps employees - and managers - understand what other departments do and operate.
It is easy to assume for the management that problems are always caused by employees, but that simply is not the case. Problems can come from various external factors such as availability of supplies, internal processes that are causing issues, or organisational policies. Seek out the other source of problems as precisely as you can in order to fix them.
You cannot expect employees to stay motivated if their achievements are never rewarded. Yet, many organisations overlook this key element. Make sure that employees are not only compensated but also recognised for their hard work. You can rest in peace that they will continue performing for your organisation.
Make sure that your organisation has shared values and cultural alignment. A sense of shared goals, beliefs and expectations among employees creates a pleasant workplace. And a harmonious workplace is good for productivity, positivity and eventually better performances.
In conclusion...
We can all agree that performance management has a significant benefits for employees and managers, as well as for the company as a whole.
For any Human Resources department, performance management is an important system for onboarding, developing and retaining employees, as well as reviewing their performance.
If you are a performance manager or human resource manager it may seem overwhelming to keep up with the entire process. But there are tools to make your life easier at work.
Simple Strata can help you align your entire employee performance management strategy.
You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it!
KPI reporting can clearly communicate the progress of a company towards its performance goals. Not only the managers can access key results in an instant and transparent manner, but also make informed strategic decisions.
When speaking of performance management, many think of the annual performance review process. But the annual performance review or appraisal is only a small component of employee performance management.
