Visit us at Learning Technologies 2012 – London Olympia, 25-26th January

There’s only one place to be on 25th and 26th January, the Learning Technologies exhibition at London’s Olympia. We’ll be there alongside 220 leading suppliers and 5,000 Learning and HR professionals for the learning event of the year.

Why not visit us on Stand 80 and find out how our easy-to-use; fully customizable employee performance management software combined with the powerful and adaptive learning management system  of our partner Strategia Ed, can provide you with a world-class EPM and LMS solution that effectively aligns and develops your employees, while driving overall business performance.

Why choose Emperform employee and talent management software

• Automating and achieve 100% on-time completion – Use Emperform to take your existing process online and get full control of your appraisal and talent management process
• Reporting and measuring performance – If you record it in your appraisal process, Emperform can report on it, leaving you to focus on addressing key issues
• Speed of set-up and implementation – Emperform is simple and easy to use, on average we can setup and implement your system within 5 days.
• Flexible software – Emperform can be installed on your own servers or we can host it for you securely in the ‘cloud’
• Multi site approach / off-line synchronization – Emperform is a web-based application which can be accessed securely wherever your employees or management team are
• All inclusive software – Unlike other vendors, Emperform is an all-inclusive (non modular) Performance and Talent Management software solution
• Free trial – We are so confident in our software that we will offer a free trial period after training and implementation to use Emperform.

To learn more about Emperform, we invite you to view a 6-minute Product Tour 

Emperform and Strategia can help you to achieve higher levels of performance through innovative, integrated and adaptive talent management and learning solutions:

• Faster onboarding by automating enrolment
• Provide the right employee training across the entire organisation to maximise business performance
• Quickly identify gaps in training
• Plan training according to identified skill gaps
• Align training with goals, skills gaps, succession planning and development requirements
• Easily manage simple and complex compliance requirements
• Reduce the complexity of creating and managing reports
• Connect formal and social learning

Visit us at Learning Technologies 2012 is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

Employee appraisals are usually a yearly event, with reviews taking place every 3-6 months. This review helps managers and employees understand if they are on track or provide an opportunity to consider whether objectives should be adjusted or more training put into place.

For you as an employee the appraisal will include completing a self-evaluation of your performance at work, before the manager provides feedback and gives their opinion on your overall performance. In order to excel in an employee appraisal it is vital that you know how to give highly effective employee appraisal answers.

Employee Appraisal Answers Quick Tips

• Approach your employee appraisal answers from an objective point of view. Do not over-score yourself, as this is likely to lead to a conflict with your manager’s results, as they will know how you have performed over the year. This in itself will put you in an uncomfortable position!
• Analyse and report on how your achievements during the course of the appraisal year have contributed towards the overall goals and objectives of the business. This will also help show that you understand your role and the ongoing aims of the organisation.
• List your major achievements for the year; don’t just think about the previous few months. Consider the whole year.
• Ensure that you have real life examples of where you have excelled. Think of customers that you have made happy, problems you have helped others resolve, key sales that you have closed and campaigns that have achieved top results. Give the dates of your achievements and accurate figures. You should also include evidence e.g. thank you emails from customers, emails featuring praise from colleagues and peers etc.
• Think about your strengths and where they make an impact on your role, the role of others and the overall business.
• Don’t forget to consider your weaknesses and areas for improvement, this is important for the section on employee development.
• Talk about training that you have done during the year and explain in what way it has helped you to improve.
• Think about what training and development you need for the upcoming year, and how these needs will contribute to your future success.
• Think about where you want to be in 2 years, 5 years and in-terms of overall career aspirations. The employee appraisal should be used as an opportunity for your manager to know where you want to head within the organisation. This can help ensure that you get the right training to achieve your career goals.
• Finally, be prepared. Ensure that you know when your appraisal is due; therefore you can give yourself plenty of time to development great employee appraisal answers and really impressive your manager.

Employee Appraisal Answers is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

Annual performance appraisals help managers to understand the performance of their staff, where they are against objectives and what their training needs are, going forwards. Appraisals also provide a formal recorded approach, official documentation and a plan for the future development of individual staff members.

To help you put a painless performance appraisal together, here are the aspects to be included in an employee appraisal form template:

Painless Performance Appraisals: Employee appraisal form template:

• Key strengths of the employee – always look at this section first as it is advisable to start the employee evaluation in a positive light.
• Review of previous years objectives – where the employees objectives achieved, and if not, were there any specific reasons why these objective were not achieved?
• Key successes and achievements for the past year – what did the employee achieve during the year including new training, projects completed, praise from managers, praise from customers etc.
• Any problems or changes since last the performance appraisal – has anything changed since the previous appraisal that has affected the employees ability to perform, their flexibility or their aspirations?
• What elements of the job does the employee find most difficult?
• What elements of the job interest the employee the most/the least?
• What does the employee consider to be the most important aspects of their job and tasks for the upcoming year?
• What are the key areas for improvement – what are the employee’s weaknesses and where should training be allocated in order to improve the employee’s performance?
• Training – What kind of training would the employee like in order to improve their natural strengths and interests?
• Teamwork ability – how does the employee perform as part of the wider department?
• Aspirations – What kind of job/role would the employee like to be doing in 2-3 years?
• Employee feedback – provide ample space on an appraisal form for employee comments

Eliminate paper-based appraisals

Of course, the most effective process for employee appraisals is not paper-based, but web-based, the true key to conducting painless performance appraisals.

emPerform provide all-in-one employee performance management software that eliminates the manual paper process and dramatically reduces the cycle time.

Want to see it for yourself? Take the 6-minute Product Tour

Painless Performance Appraisals is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

The backbone of any good performance appraisal process is to make sure you a good employee appraisal form to support it. Using an employee appraisal sample is a great way of starting off the development of your supporting documentation for your appraisal process. There are many different aspects that need to be recorded in an appraisal, using an employee appraisal sample can help identify all the items you need to record – in addition, using an employee appraisal sample can help you get your appraisal process up and running quickly – you would have to invest a significantly larger amount of time in developing your own forms without the use of an employee appraisal sample.

Better still, you can take an existing employee appraisal sample that is available online and tailor it to your company’s needs – so you can go from a generic employee appraisal sample to your own tailored employee appraisal form very quickly.

We started to look at how to build an employee appraisal form and came up with our own list of things you should expect to find in an employee appraisal sample.

Objectives – any decent employee appraisal sample should include the individuals objectives on the form. In addition, you would expect an employee appraisal sample to also include the organisational goals and objectives. Without this, no measurement can really take place so make sure any employee appraisal sample you are using contains this vital information or an area to at least record it.

Team / Peer review – you should look to make sure the employee appraisal sample you are using contains areas on the employee appraisal sample for an employee’s team, peers, direct reports and managers to feed into. This is more commonly known as 360 degree feedback and is becoming more and more of a feature in an employee appraisal sample.

Individual review – make sure your employee appraisal sample has room to accommodate your employees to carry out a self appraisal. This are of an employee appraisal sample allows employees to share their thoughts on their achievements and progress in the year, and more importantly what has helped and hindered them in reaching their objectives.

Work issues – an employee appraisal sample must definitely include an area for the employee to record any problems they are having at work, or where there job is no longer in line with their expectations. This may include working hours, salary issues or be as severe as bullying and harassment in your organisation. Without a doubt this is one of the most crucial areas on an employee appraisal sample.

Ratings in performance measurement – your employee appraisal sample should include an area for more objective and less descriptive ratings to occur. This is particularly important if you intend on using an employee appraisal sample in a sales or production environment where structured and measurable ratings are important.

Lateness – make sure you employee appraisal sample includes an area to record absenteeism and lateness. If this is included in your employee appraisal sample then you will be able to measure how cost efficient and effective your employees are.

Employee Appraisal Form Sample is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

When you carry out an employee performance appraisal a considerable amount of information is discussed and analysed. It is important that you make the right employee appraisal comments both in conversation and when writing your employee appraisal comments in document form. Appraisals are meant to be objective, but quite often can become subjective from the employees perspective – therefore it is extremely important that you make the right employee appraisal comments.

Without going into some of the disastrous employee appraisal comments that people have made over the years of conducting employee appraisals, we have made a list of the dos and donts of employee appraisal comments – both for in your appraisal and afterwards when you are putting your employee appraisal comments to paper.

Firstly – be prepared! It goes without saying that as a manger or an employee if you aren’t prepared for the appraisal process you are likely to either miss the opportunity to make employee appraisal comments or, even worse, make incorrect or insensitive employee appraisal comments. Therefore we suggest you know what you are going to talk about.

Make notes – employee appraisals often look back over a long period of time and therefore a lot of relevant employee appraisal comments are made during the appraisal process. By taking notes you can make sure that you have the right information for completing your documents later on – ensuring that you make valid employee appraisal comments and an accurate portrayal of the discussion you had.

Avoid being subjective – Don’t make employee appraisal comments that are likely to cause offense or that you cant justify. Some appraisal processes can be difficult, particularly when dealing with underperforming employees – make sure your employee appraisal comments are objective and accurate and avoid writing down or saying any employee appraisal comments that are subjective and not based on fact.

Positive and negative – to make sure everyone gets the most out of the appraisal process you need to make sure you are making and recording both positive employee appraisal comments and employee appraisal comments that are focussed on improving performance. It is particularly important that you are prepared to be constructive in your employee appraisal comments with those employees that are underperforming. You cannot expect someone to improve their performance if they do not know there is a problem – therefore be prepared to make employee appraisal comments that whilst being objective and fair, your employee may not want to hear.

Above all, remember that putting down factually inaccurate employee appraisal comments or unjustified or insensitive employee appraisal comments can cause severe problems. Appraisal documents are stored on employee records and can be used in case of constructive dismissal and other matters that can be taken to an employee tribunal – make sure your employee appraisal comments are fair. If in doubt it would be a good idea to run through any employee appraisal comments that you wish to make with another manager or equivalent colleague to sense check the employee appraisal comments you are about to make in a review meeting, or about to commit to paper.

Employee Appraisal Feedback Dos & Dont’s is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

Conducting an employee performance appraisal is an important skill in effective management – however, only a small percentage of managers actually get the approach right. We’ve put together some hints and tips on how to carry out a great employee performance appraisal.

Always remember the purpose of an employee performance appraisal is to build the confidence of the person being appraised as well as to provide them with an understanding of their areas of improvement. If there are any performance issues, you must make sure these are communicated in the employee performance appraisal. If you do not make the employee aware of both their strengths and areas for improvement then you are not making full use of the employee performance appraisal.

Make your employee performance appraisal an ongoing process. This shouldn’t be a one off, annual meeting – because then you will not understand how well your employee is working towards their goals set in the employee performance appraisal. At least once a month, have an informal ‘chat’ with your employee. You should aim to identify what is going well and the areas for improvement against the objectives you have set out in the employee performance appraisal.

Employee performance appraisals are a two way process. It’s important that you achieve an equal balance of talking and listening in employee performance appraisals.

Communicating organisational objectives in the employee performance appraisal. You should always use the employee performance appraisal to communicate the organisations objectives and to make sure your employee understands the role that they play. Organisational objectives should be cascaded down into the employee performance appraisal.

Understand work expectations from the employee performance appraisal. This is a great opportunity for you to understand the expectations of your employee during their employee performance appraisal. These can range from the level and seniority of work they are undertaking, the hours they are working to many other issues that may occur in an office environment. The employee performance appraisal is an ideal environment for the employee to raise these expectations – if they are not forthcoming in this area you should use the employee performance appraisal as an opportunity to probe and investigate further.

Focus on both strengths and weaknesses in the employee performance appraisal. Focus on the strengths of the employee, deal with the weaknesses you identify. This is a basic requirement of carrying out an effective employee performance appraisal – miss this and you have missed the point of the employee performance appraisal.

Make sure you compensate for a good employee performance appraisal. Apart from the standard issue of financial compensation, it is important that you focus on other requirements for your employee (for example training), and provide suitable rewards during the employee performance appraisal.

Finally, don’t forget the golden rule – never go into an employee performance appraisal as a manager and be unprepared. Make sure you know what you need to say to your employee and how you are going to say it – this will make sure that you control the direction and speed of the employee performance appraisal.

How To Perform Employee Performance Appraisals is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

The process for completing employee appraisal forms is often looked upon with severe trepidation by managers within organisations of all sizes. The main reason for this is because employee appraisal forms take so much time to fill in, are cumbersome and can involve some uncomfortable discussions with employees who may have under-performed or failed to achieve their objectives during the course of the year.

If the employee appraisal form is not put together well in the first place it can easily add to the frustration of managers.

The following guidelines can help you to make sure that your forms are user-friendly.

Employee Appraisal Forms – What You Need to Know

• Make employee appraisal forms simple to use – Provide clear instructions for both employees and managers. Always provide examples so they thoroughly understand what information is required of them
• Ensure that the form isn’t too long – 2-3 pages should be long enough
• Review previous goals and objectives – This review should take place right at the start of the form. Remember goals and objectives can change during the year, so ensure that goals are up-to-date in order to ensure a smooth review and avoid any mis-alignment between employee and manager.
• Analyse employee strengths and areas for development – include up to 5 strengths and 3-4 areas for development. Ensure areas of development are approached in a positive manner and do not classify them as employee weaknesses.
• Try to include open-ended questions – Questions that can initiate one-word answers are not helpful e.g. “do you like your job?” Open-ended questions guarantee the best possible feedback, encourage employees to engage with the process and provide more truthful and expressive answers.
• Create customized employee appraisal forms for different job roles – Ensure that specific objectives and competencies are specific and applicable to the particular job role and not generic to cover all roles.
• Encourage goals that are SMART – goals should always be specific to the role, measurable, achievable, realistic and include a target completion date.
• Provide plenty of room on the form for feedback – employee feedback is absolutely critical to an effective process so make sure there is ample space on the employee appraisal form for plenty of detail.
• Provide some simple training for employees on writing appraisals

Eliminate paper-based appraisals with your employee appraisal

Of course, the most effective process for employee appraisals is not paper-based, but web-based.

emPerform is a unique, all-in-one performance management solution, that eliminates the manual paper process and dramatically reduces the cycle time. The flexible, user-friendly software can be structured around best practices, ensure compliance and participation and provide comprehensive metrics, analysis and reporting, talent management, adding real value to your business.

Want to see it for yourself? Take the 6-minute Product Tour

Employee Appraisal Forms is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

However the appraisal process can be very frustrating, as managers often do not prioritise and complete on-schedule, are overly subjective or have different approaches or interpretations across departments leading to distorted and non-comparable results. Furthermore, constantly having to chase managers for sign-off can be extremely time consuming.

As a result of these difficulties, in order to achieve successful and highly effective performance appraisals more and more companies are turning to employee performance management software. For example, a software solution enables:

• Integration of organisations goals and competencies
• Alignment of employee goals and effective monitoring of their progress against them
• Measurement of employee performance using a variety of tools, reports and analytics
• High achievers to be easily identified and rewarded
• Skills gaps to be highlighted and filled with the correct people
• Succession planning and effective career development plans
• Creation of employee evaluation forms using a variety of tools and ready made templates
• Regular automated email reminders to ensure managers and employees stay on track and conduct appraisals on time
• Creation of powerful ‘out of the box’ or customised reports and analytics quickly and easily
• Employees to deliver great results

What makes employee performance management software even more attractive is that it is usually so easy to use that no special training or skills are required. The software can easily be managed by an HR Administrator and used by employees at various levels within an organisation.

Employee performance management software can give an organisation a competitive edge through increased employee engagement which in turn leads to a higher level of productivity. It is a highly recommended tool for any organisation.

Why Invest in Employee Performance Software? is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

Carrying out an effective employee performance evaluation can often be the difference between having an employee that is engaged with business goals and objectives and motivated in their job; rather than someone who is unclear on the goals and objectives of the business or the part that they play in working towards them. When you consider that for a company to reach its objectives it needs the support of engaged and productive employees, the role of effective employee performance evaluations is even more crucial.

As a manager you spend a considerable amount of time, energy and budget in building a team that contributes to the success and objectives of your company. But with your own objectives and deadlines to work to, the responsibility of making sure your team are delivering work effectively and on time as well as managing expectations upwards to senior managers and directors – carrying out an effective employee performance evaluation can seem like a difficult and daunting prospect.

To make sure you get the most out of your employee performance evaluations we have put together ten tried and tested suggestions from the HR community:

- Review progress regularly – Whilst you may only conduct one main employee performance evaluation for each member of your team over the course of a year, it is important that you supplement this with shorter regular reviews. By carrying out these reviews you begin to understand the progress that is being made towards objectives and start to identify exceptional performance as well as poor employee performance. You can deal with any issues proactively and help your employees or team members in reaching their objectives – this will ultimately make the employee performance evaluation a more positive experience for both you and your employee.

- Be prepared – Always make sure you have prepared for an employee performance evaluation – ensuring that any necessary paperwork is complete well in advance of the meeting. This will mean ensuring that your employees have the right paperwork to complete and that you set deadlines for the return of this paperwork. You will need to make sure you give yourself enough time to read the documents that have been sent to you and that you have prepared the points you wish to discuss in this meeting. If you are a new manager to a business you should also consult with your Human Resources or Personnel departments so that you are familiar with the process that you should follow. Make sure you book meeting rooms in advance, so you are able to hold your review in privacy.

- Be positive – It is important that you use an employee performance evaluation as an opportunity to recognise an employee’s strengths and to acknowledge the contribution that they make to your team and business objectives.

- Be firm but fair – Make sure you handle your performance reviews consistently – and where you identify areas of poor performance, your employees need to hear that their performance needs improving. Some people struggle giving constructive feedback, particularly to employees they get on well with personally. You need to identify areas of poor performance so that an employee can start to make improvements in these areas – if you don’t do this then you are missing out on a great opportunity. Conversely, you should also remember that the purpose of an employee performance evaluation is to evaluate job performance – it is not an open ended invitation to moan about anything and everything that an employee may or may not be doing!

- Understanding work / life balance – Make sure you are able to identify any potential problems in your employee’s work / life balance. Some employees find it difficult to bring this to their manager’s attention (especially if they are worried about job security) – but making sure that an employee is coping with the expectations and demands placed upon them in their job is an important part of this process.

- Discuss career aspirations – An employee performance evaluation is a fantastic opportunity to understand the future career aspirations of your employee. Sometimes the career path you may have chosen for a member of your team may not be the path they would choose for themselves and this can often lead to misaligned personal development objectives.

- Be a good listener – The employee performance evaluation provides a good mechanism for you to listen and understand not only how well they are performing, but will also give you plenty of clues as to how they are feeling about their job, both in terms of satisfaction and future development opportunities.

- Make it a dialogue, not a monologue – An employee performance evaluation should not be a one way conversation – leaving your employee to simply list their achievements throughout the year. You should make sure you are able to input into the conversation – reinforcing achievements and asking further questions which require your employee’s input.

- Be realistic – It goes without saying, but making sure that future objectives for your employees are achievable, realistic, and relevant to the business objectives and can be measured is crucial for ongoing employee performance evaluation. If an employee’s future goals and objectives are not achievable or measurable, they will have a hard time in meeting their objectives and you will have an even harder time objectively managing their performance!

- Don’t end on a negative – It would be great if every employee performance evaluation went perfectly, that everyone was hitting their objectives and there were no performance issues whatsoever. However, we know that isn’t always the case. We’ve already mentioned that it’s important to identify poor performance to an employee in a fair and consistent manner – but make sure you don’t end on a negative. It’s important that your employees leave their review feeling motivated and ready to meet their future objectives – so try to always end on a positive!

Employee Performance Evaluation – Worth The Investment? is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software

How Employee Productivity Software Can Help Your Business

Employee productivity software provides a unique way of over-coming this problem. In addition to monitoring the level of employee productivity, it can provide highly effective metrics and management reports, identify talent and skills gaps within your organisation, help with performance related pay, ensure employees are aligned with the goals and objectives of the business and improve the level of employee engagement and motivation.

Employee Productivity Software: The Advantages

Let’s look at a few of these advantages in turn. Firstly, employee productivity software is highly effective at helping organisations to set and track the status and progress of performance goals in real time. If performance results highlight any dips the issue can be quickly addressed in a timely and efficient manner.

If an employee is made aware of the expectations set out for them during a quarter and know that the results are regularly monitored, they are more much likely to complete these highlighted goals, instead of focusing on less business critical tasks.

Another really important element of employee productivity software is the metrics, reporting and analytics that it can provide.

It’s very difficult to successfully achieve detailed and consistent reporting with a manual productivity and performance review process. In addition, any analysis that does take place is likely to be very time-consuming and inconsistent.

Automated employee productivity software gives you the ability to effectively report and analyse employee data both during the performance appraisal process and on a regular basis by reviewing their progress against their objectives and goals.

Employee productivity software can give easy instant access to real-time reports. It also gives you access to an array of pre-defined templates and professional reports as well as giving you the ability to create and customise your own unique reports to help with your talent management processes. In addition, you can export your reports in different formats including PDF and excel spreadsheet and automate the delivery of weekly or monthly reports via email to those at management level.

With all these benefits employee productivity software is quickly becoming a must have for organisations that recognise the importance that their employees contribute to revenue generation and really want to gain a competitive advantage in their marketplace.

Employee Productivity Software – Does It Work? is a post from: Employee Appraisal Software