End of year reviews

Roly:

Hello, I'm Roly from Appraisd. And I've got with me today, Richard, who's Head of our Customer Success team. And we thought we'd have a quick chat about people who are coming up to a year end review time, and are maybe thinking about moving to continuous performance management, which is obviously what we advise. However, not all organisations can do that all in one go. So I thought I'd bring Richard on to talk about this, because he's overseen probably hundreds of implementations of Appraisd at this sort of time of year, and I thought, I would get his thoughts. So first of all, thinking about organisations who are coming up to year end reviews, perhaps they don't have time or the inclination to kind of change everything right now and tear everything up and start again, they've got a process that they're sort of familiar with, what advice would you give them now?

Richard:

I'd say the first thing is just overcome the hurdle of getting things online, we consistently hear from our clients and their employees that the difficult thing about doing things offline is you fill out the document, it either sits in a drive somewhere on your computer or, or sits on your desk or in a drawer. And it's hard to continually focus on, not just where you've been last year, but also what you've set for the year ahead. So even if you do the exact same process, as you've been doing offline, but take it online, it's the first step to moving towards something that is more continuous and more agile. So I'd say, first step, don't necessarily overhaul the process just get them doing the exact same review in the same structure as you would offline. But take it online so that you're setting yourselves up for something that is more agile and more able to be evolved as the year goes through. Because we're seeing as, as we're getting more turbulent and challenging business environment, it's crucial for organisations and their employees, to be able to adapt to changing scenarios. So it's no good just to set your objectives at the start of the year, kind of forget about them, and then review them at the end of the year, you want to set yourself up so that you can review them, whether it's quarterly, whether it's more continuously than that, and just check that the things you're working on, they're still relevant to the environment that you're in the objectives of the business, and you're able to tweak them and evolve them throughout the year.

Roly:

So sometimes, when we are onboarding clients we talked about what is the first thing they're going to do when they start using the system. At this sort of time of the year, and we're talking with some clients right now, some customers want to get their existing process online. They want to use their existing forms, and run with it online with a view to once they're on the platform evolving their process over time. However, others might just say, well let's do what we normally do now, but for January, let's get people putting in their new goals on Appraisd and getting the benefit of that kind of fluid, more frequent updating process you described?

Richard:

Yeah, definitely. I think there's, as you say, there's two approaches, you can go down and you say, right, we're not going to be able to get there quick enough to do the year end review online. So we do that offline. But we get the system in place so that the objective setting can happen online, and set ourselves up for for an online process next year. Or, and we can do this very quickly as we've got experience of doing this in a very short space of time, we quickly replicate your offline form in an online system. So the first thing you do is, you go in and complete the year end review. And then you go in and set your objectives for the year ahead. So we can be quite agile in the way that we kick off this process.

Roly:

And of course, your team are able to help guide anyone through that whole process and set out a plan and a timeline, a communication strategy, and so on all around the new process?

Richard:

Yeah, definitely. So the first thing we do is really understand what you're looking to achieve by moving your current process online. And what are the first things that you need to happen in order to get value from it as quickly as possible. So as I said before, that may well just be taking what we're doing offline and move it online. Or it may be that you want to just tweak the process slightly because you want to focus on conversations around career development or employee personal development. So it may be we want to take the first step in making sure that all of our objectives throughout the business are in line and aligned with the business goals. And we've had extensive experience of working with clients and all of those different scenarios. So we can guide you on what's worked for others, what doesn't work and things to consider when taking those steps to evolve your process.

Roly:

Nice one. Thank you Richard. Let's talk again soon.

Richard:

Yes, definitly.