Performance evaluation and improvement now play a vital role in the modern workplace. Organizations work tirelessly to become the best and every manager wants their employees to be as productive and happy as they can be. One way to ensure this happens is to offer regular performance reviews.

Most HR professionals understand the benefits of performance management, but successfully integrating a process can sometimes be a challenge. Quite often an implementation project can lead to a complete failure or at the very least it fails to live up to expectations. The software is often blamed for the failure, but more often than not, the most common cause of system implementation failures are insufficient planning, selecting inappropriate software, and poor implementation. 

Here's a 10 step guide to help you get it right this time around and implement a new performance management system effectively.

1. Establish a Project Team and Prepare a Plan

Performance management is a process that affects everyone in a business. Therefore, any change should be carefully planned and treated as a formal project. There should be a dedicated project team involved, in addition to HR. Include line managers and employees in the team as they will be the main system users.

Prepare a project plan, allocating dates and responsibilities for each separate task in the plan. The plan should include all stages of the project, from planning and software selection to going live and ongoing success measurement. 

2. Define Why Your Business Needs the System

If you want a project to be successful the team needs to understand why there is a need. Encourage the team to define what problems the software needs to solve. What are the system goals, and what criteria can be used to establish success?

Here's one idea for a goal:

• To make it easier for employees and managers to complete and sign off the paperwork for performance reviews.

A success measure for this goal would be for 75% of staff to agree that it's made the process easier. The measure could be done using a post-implementation survey. 

3. Document the Requirements

This is an essential step before you formally choose the software. It's something to be done with the project management team as this will capture different perspectives. 

Split the requirements into essentials and desirable. Consider both functional requirements (what you want the system to do) and non-functional requirements (how it should do it). Non-functional examples include ease of use, intuitiveness, look and feel, and cloud-based. 

4. Choose Your Software

There are several factors to consider when choosing your software:

• The culture of the system: Is it centered around scoring and assessment or more qualitative feedback and discussion?

• Mobile responsiveness: Does the system adjust itself automatically to suit the size of the user's screen, thereby providing a good user experience?

• Support and expertise: Where is the support based? Does the supplier understand best practice when it comes to using the software?

• Simplicity: If there are too many features it may detract from meaningful performance discussions and be confusing for users.

• Security: How secure is the system? For example, is it securely encrypted and is the data hosted in an ISO27001 compliant data center?

5. Get Internal Buy-In

You'll find it helpful to prepare a business case study if you want to get senior management buy-in. It will also help secure funding if there isn't already a budget.

To get key stakeholders and influencers within the business to buy in as soon as possible, arrange for a demo of the preferred system. They are far more likely to support the idea when you involve them at an early stage. 

6. Configure and Test the System

You must test the system after it's been configured. Test a full end-to-end process starting with setting up a new user. Check things such as approval emails, mandatory field validation, error messages, printing, and reports. 

It's also important to check any data integration processes you've set up for transferring employee data from your HR system.

7. Plan Communications

Before the launch of the software, release several different communications to introduce the new system and how it should be used. Consider a range of methods because different people respond better to different forms of communication.

8. Setup Support Arrangements

If the software you've chosen is easy-to-use and intuitive, there should be no need to train employees in how to use it. However, that doesn't mean you won't need to put in place support arrangements to help those who may have specific queries or concerns, and for those who are not particularly computer savvy. 

9. Carry out a Pilot

Carry out a pilot test with one or two different departments, before you launch the performance management software to the whole business. Make sure they go through part of the performance management cycle, and ask for feedback on whether there were any difficulties, and how easy it was to use. 

10. Launch the Software 

Before the software is officially launched, run some final checks on the employee data and reporting lines. Also, check that email addresses have been whitelisted by the IT department because you don't want emails from the system to end up in junk email folders.

Once you've launched the system, put processes in place to measure progress against the original goals and success criteria.