An overview of our onboarding process at Appraisd
Here's an overview of the Appraisd onboarding process. When you join Appraisd, you'll be given access to additional resources, tips on how to maximise adoption and technical detail on how to guarantee a straightforward and successful rollout.
1. Discuss requirements and goals
The first stage of the onboarding process is for you to decide what your performance management requirements will be and your desired outcomes from implementing Appraisd. Your Customer Success Manager will be able to recommend the best account configuration to meet your requirements.
Things to consider:
- Is this part of a wider project or goal that your company is looking to achieve?
- What performance management behaviours and routines would you like your employees to adopt?
- How would you ideally measure success? Any baseline metrics? For example, having a certain number of objectives set for each employee or a certain number of check-ins completed per year.
Some practicalities:
- How frequently will reviews/check-ins be taking place?
- How will objectives be configured and tracked?
- What role do you want feedback to play in your performance management process?
- Do your employees work from computers or are they mobile? Will you be using single sign-on?
- Will you use our API to integrate your HR database with Appraisd?
- Do you require any custom training videos?
- When do you want to launch? Will you launch to everyone at the same time?
- Do you want to launch every feature in one go or gradually build over time?
Appraisd will have one or more calls with you to discuss these requirements and agree on the onboarding process. Once the overall aims have been agreed upon, Appraisd will work with you to put together a list of technical configuration requirements, the milestones/deliverables for the onboarding project and the timeframe.
This stage can take anything from 1 call to a week depending on how long it takes you to decide on your process and requirements.
2. System configuration and SSO
Based on the requirements and process that have been agreed upon during Stage 1, we will help you configure your account and make it ready for the testing phase. This will include:
- Configuring objectives templates
- Building forms (we will create up to 3 forms for you)
- Configuring feedback processes
- Adding users
- Setting up review cycles
- Agreeing on review workflows
- Configuring branding and company announcement
- Deciding on language requirements (key terminology and system translation)
- Administration rights
- Customising email content
Single sign-on can also be configured (if required) and other integrations will be discussed at this stage. If you need custom training videos we will agree on the content of them at this stage (subject to final revisions based on testing).
This stage can take anything from 2 working days to 4 weeks. The time taken will depend on how quickly you can decide on your requirements. If all requirements are agreed at the previous stage and do not change, Appraisd will be able to get them built within a couple of days.
The time taken will also depend on the complexity of the requirements, predominantly the number of forms required. If you require an API to be set-up to sync your user data ahead of launch, this will add to the time taken to configure the account.
3. Internal testing
Once your account is configured, you’ll need to test that your process works in practice. Things that you may want to test are:
- Reviews and check-ins including forms and workflows
- Objectives
- The feedback process
Either work in pairs/groups where there is a person acting as each role in the performance management process or use the ‘view as’ tool to test these roles on your own. Here is our sample testing plan.
Look out for any wording that doesn’t make sense or any additional notes you’d like to add to help make the process clearer. Do you need any of the questions to be required for a specific role? Does the process flow and everything make sense? Collate your questions and changes so that we can refine the set-up based on them.
We will also conduct our own run-through of your process to review your configuration from our side and give feedback if we have any improvements to recommend.
This stage will take between 1 and 10 working days depending on how many changes and rounds of testing are required.
4. Configuration sign-off
Once internal testing has been completed, work with your Customer Success Manager to make any changes to forms, settings or other parts of your account configuration e.g. feedback visibility or the overall process (you may decide to change the frequency of reviews).
Appraisd will help put together a Quality Assurance checklist that can be used when signing-off the configuration. This is also a good time to discuss any training sessions that may be required for your employees and managers.
This stage typically takes 1-2 working days and includes a call with Appraisd to review the configuration.
5. Internal communications
We recommend that you put together a plan for communicating to your staff that Appraisd is being implemented, the timeframe for launch and your expectations from them upon rollout. If you are launching a new performance management process to accompany the launch of Appraisd you may want to consider communicating it to staff alongside Appraisd. We are happy to read any communications and suggest changes. Click the link below to see our example templates.
Here is a typical plan:
6. Employee onboarding
System administrators will be trained by their Customer Success Manager on how to perform admin tasks on the system. The training will include (but will not be limited to):
- How to add, deactivate and edit employee data
- How to add, delete and edit reviews
- How to run reports on reviews, feedback and objectives
- How to send emails (including launch emails)
- How to update configuration settings
Following the admin training, we would recommend that you test your admin rights to make sure that you are comfortable with performing these tasks.
Employees will be trained in how to use Appraisd. This training can either be delivered by your internal staff or by Appraisd for an additional fee. If you're conducting the training internally, you can refer to our train-the-trainer guide.
Any training delivered by Appraisd will be designed in collaboration with you to ensure that the tone, flow and content match your desired process and expectations of how your staff should use Appraisd. It should also be prefaced by an introduction from a member of your team. This person should also be on hand during the training to answer any questions about the performance management process or the configuration that has been chosen. The Appraisd trainer would only answer questions about the technical use of the platform.
Training may also include an introduction to your new performance management process or wider company goals if you are changing these alongside the implementation of Appraisd
If you have commissioned training videos they will be made available to you at this stage.
It is also a good idea to enable our Slack integration at this point.
The time that this stage takes will depend on the number of training sessions that you want to run and how spaced out the training sessions will be. Anything from 1 hour to a few weeks.
7. Launch
Once you’re happy that your account is ready to go and you’ve had sign-off from internal stakeholders, you’ll need to launch to your employees.
Think about what you’d like to include in this welcome email and draft your copy ahead of time.
Are you launching to your whole organisation at once or gradually?
Use the Appraisd email tool to send your employees your customised welcome email and the system will give them a unique login link for them to create a password. If you’re using SSO, the email will contain an SSO link.
If you would like Appraisd to send email reminders for in-progress reviews and check-ins, double-check that this setting is enabled.
8. Review and refine
Following your launch, we recommend that you gather feedback from admins and users. You may consider surveying your staff about their initial experience of using Appraisd.
Appraisd will discuss your performance management goals and desired outcomes with you to assess how the first few weeks/month of Appraisd is helping you achieve them. If a review period has been completed, the Appraisd team can provide stats on usage. For example:
- How many users completed reviews
- The number of overdue reviews or reviews closed after the deadline
- The percentage of users who logged in
- The number of objectives added
Based on the feedback your configuration or process can be changed. This often requires another iteration of internal testing.
Appraisd welcomes any suggested changes or additions to features. We cannot guarantee that they will be built but all requests will be considered when deciding on our development roadmap.
1 month after launch we’ll ask you to complete a short feedback questionnaire to help us continuously improve our service and check you’re getting what you need.
Have a specific question about implementation?
Give us a call on +44 (0) 20 7202 7979 or email support@appraisd.com right away.
