Company Performance Reports: A Sneak Peek

At BambooHR, our main goal is to help you create a great place to work, and the first step toward creating a great place to work is analyzing your organization’s current working conditions. We began this process with our Performance module, and now we’re excited to announce an extension of those features with new Company Performance reports. To learn more, I sat down with Daniel Dean, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, and asked about the changing nature of performance management.

Every organization wants to be successful. The difference is in how they define that success or the metrics they use to measure success. For decades, the classic business mantra was shareholders first, customers second, employees third, and this definition of success shaped how leaders of organizations formed their business strategy.

And let’s face it, under this system, leadership was putting in their best guesses. Without effective technology to analyze the effects of their choices, upper leadership relied on easily-visible indicators such as stock price and sales numbers to see if their plans were going in the right direction.

Today, there’s a wealth of research that indicates that the classic mantra should be reversed: take care of your employees and they’ll take care of your customers, and happy customers will keep your shareholders happy. And the effective leaders out there are taking notice, which puts additional pressure on HR to improve the employee experience.

So if HR is going to improve the employee experience, we need to fix one of the key activities used to measure and manage the employee experience: the performance review. Let’s be honest; the traditional performance review doesn’t do much to improve the employee experience. How do I know? In our research here at BambooHR, we found that employees hate receiving performance reviews almost as much as managers hate giving them.

We found that the traditional performance review suffers from four primary shortcomings: time, frequency, subjectivity, and purpose. Traditional reviews take too long to complete, and because they take so much time, managers can’t (or won’t) set aside time to do them frequently. These reviews also tend to be subjective in nature, more a reflection of the manager than the employee. And as for purpose, many reviews focus on justifying a pay decision instead of actually helping employees improve.

Our performance system addresses these shortcomings with a framework for managers to create high-impact performance reviews.  Our review doesn’t take too long to complete and only asks the most important questions to help managers help employees improve. These questions focus on value, recognition, and giving employees what they need to do their best work.  Our reviews identify strengths AND weaknesses, giving managers the building blocks to improve performance and engagement.  And with predetermined questions that focus on intentions rather than feelings, our survey removes as much manager subjectivity as possible. 

Because our reviews are brief, employees and managers can put meaningful thought into completing them instead of putting them off or rushing through them. This gives managers the time to have more frequent reviews, and the more frequently reviews are performed, the more relevant the insight becomes. Managers can address issues and highlight achievements in the moment rather than months afterward.

To date, Bamboo Performance Management has helped thousands of managers gain the insight they need to deliver truly meaningful performance reviews, reviews that actually help managers and employees improve.  And helping people improve lets you provide a better employee experience, which relieves the pressure on HR.

To advance this goal even further, we’re happy to announce that new Company Performance Reports are coming soon. This feature summarizes performance data for the entire company, including its departments, managers, and locations, providing a whole new level of insight for HR and upper-level managers. Company Performance Reports help answer the most pressing performance questions: how does performance compare across departments? Which teams feel the most valued? Is performance improving? With these reports, HR and the management team can analyze which initiatives are leading to results, letting you make decisions based on the big picture.

With Company Performance Reports, you can make strategies to improve every level of your organization, connecting your mission to every satisfied employee. It’s just another way that BambooHR helps you create a great place to work. Go to your BambooHR reports and look for Company Performance, you might just get a sneak peek!