Running an organization is no easy task. It’s like peeling an onion. The more you peel, the more are the layers you discover. (And sometimes, the effort brings tears to your eyes!).

Especially, when it comes to human resource management activities, it is filled with detail-oriented tasks. Be it attendance tracking, filling in time sheets, conducting office activities, approving leave and time offs, performance management – they all involve a lot of procedures and documentation. These consume a lot of time that could otherwise be invested in productive tasks such as recruiting quality people for the organization.

That is why a lot of these tasks are now automated. You have HRM software products that have loads of useful features such as attendance tracking, leave management, time tracking and so on. They also come complete with social tools that promote communication among employees. Let’s take a look at one particular feature that might interest many HR professionals – employee performance management.

Earlier, this used to be an annual exercise or perhaps once in six months. There used to be a lengthy interval between two reviews. But now with the advent of these software products, you can review an employee’s performance as they accomplish the tasks given to them. You can set goals for them and check if they have completed them. You can track progress, provide feedback; make comments and suggestions on the tasks. This tool is a huge relief because it saves a lot of time and is accurate. There is a record for everything; if you have employees working from home or overseas, this is a life saver.

This not only helps you with performance management but also tells you crucial information about where exactly your employees have difficulties. Since you can set small goals, you can actually find out effortlessly, at which point of a particular process, they face issues and you can work on rectifying them. Since you are also able to track performance on an hourly basis, you can actually measure productivity. Let’s say you quote a client a certain amount assuming a task takes 400 man hours. When you have a lot of people working on it, tracking it manually is a complicated process. But when things are automated, you don’t have to move a muscle. You get accurate metrics in seconds, and you can see if indeed the process took 400 hours or more. Accordingly, you can quote accurately the next time or make your process more efficient. These are important business decisions and HR automation facilitates this.

The performance management feature can also be customized to suit complex review processes some companies have. Depending on the hierarchy in an organization, the review process may need multiple approvals from managers. This can also be accommodated.

At the end of the day, you save a lot of time and have your HR experts spend time on productive tasks such as recruitment, team building activities, training and so on rather than book-keeping and secretarial tasks like maintaining attendance log books and time tracking. How do you manage performance in your organization? What learning have you had from your systems? Let us know.