Human capital management (HCM) is more than just payroll and benefits. It’s about building and scaling high-performing teams, and supporting people so they can be at their best. In our previous article, we covered the broader impact of content tools in human capital management. Today we’ll zoom in on another important piece of the HCM puzzle: performance initiatives.
Performance reviews, feedback, and fair evaluations are essential for organizational growth. If companies want employees to perform at their best, they must support the employees’ ability to own and promote their own professional growth. This is an enormous ask forany organization, so it comes as no surprise that many companies struggle with consistency, fairness, and efficiency in feedback processes. The right content management tools can help teams face these challenges by standardizing feedback, minimizing bias, and reducing time managers spend drafting and approving reviews.
Human Capital Management content workflow use cases: How software teams can help streamline performance reviews
It’s up to product and engineering teams to make performance review content creation easier for HR, managers, and employees. Let’s look at a few ways that these challenges in performance management can be solved with the right content tools.
Creating standardized performance reviews
Feedback and performance reviews should be individualized to each team member. But standardized formatting of reviews and feedback forms guides leaders through the review process and keeps feedback organized and clear for team members. Inconsistency can lead to miscommunication, something that’s bad for the employee and potentially problematic for the business.
One way to address inconsistencies in reviews is to use content tools that allow the creation of predefined templates with critical metrics. If an internal HR application has the right rich text editor integrated into it, features like merge tags could be used for employee names, start date, company performance ratings, and more when annual performance reviews are sent out. Enhanced tables can be used to create standard rating scales, which can be incorporated into reviews. Then everyone can come together to discuss future professional growth.
Here’s a real world example. Questions like “What does [Employee] do well?” and “What can [Employee] improve on?” can be paired with questions for the employee to answer like “What do I do well?” and “What can I improve on?”. Everyone fills out their half of the performance review and meets to discuss the results. As managers and employees get together to review performance feedback, the questions are already aligned. The conversation can turn towards new solutions for improvements in the coming performance cycle, instead of clarifying the feedback itself.
Mitigating unconscious bias with standard review phrasing
No matter what your career has looked like, you’ve likely received a review at some point that felt unfair or biased. Unconscious bias can creep into performance reviews, which leads to more frustration than growth on the part of the employee, the manager, and the team. It can be tough for managers to separate personal opinions from professional reviews and deliver useful feedback that can grow the employee and the team. This could damage company reputation, lead to turnover, or hurt team morale.
Content tools can help mitigate unconscious bias with a systematic content management approach for performance reviews. Reviews that could damage company reputation or change perception in the market can be mitigated with uniform review phrasing and predefined professional feedback. We’ve already talked about standardizing questions and metrics, but unconscious bias could still creep in through some of the more general feedback questions. Standardizing review phrasing is one way to solve this problem.
Implementing an AI Assistant for managers that has a dictionary of helpful words, phrases, and structured prompts to help them stay professional while delivering feedback creates consistency. Another solution is to lock down historic review data and make the templates read-only, to ensure managers base long-term feedback on an accurate and unaltered history.
Reducing review-writing workload for managers
A standardized process is all well and good, but what if you’re a manager or an HR team that has to review and approve dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of performance reviews on an annual basis? Some enterprises have bi-annual reviews that HR teams spend entire quarters working on. So for managers of large teams and HR teams in enterprises, the performance review process can be overwhelming. And that’s when everything is running smoothly. Time is money in business, and time spent on human capital management is no exception. Most performance review processes can take months to organize, complete, approve, and evaluate.
It is possible for the right content tools to help reduce the ever-present review writing workload for managers and HR teams in enterprise-level organizations. Looking over dozens or hundreds of reviews on a regular basis can be done faster and more efficiently with the right features integrated into the employee management system.
We’ve already talked a little about how predefined prompts from an AI Assistant or templates with specific metric fields ready to fill out can help with performance reviews. It is more efficient to use repeatable, read-only sections for annual disclaimers and legal information so managers don’t have to copy and paste the same material into every review, and HR teams don’t need to reinvent the wheel to prvide boilerplate for managers to use.
Providing a comments and mentions system in performance reviews is another great way for HR teams or departmental leaders to suggest edits before they finalize and approve reviews. Usually more than one person has to lay eyes on a review before it can be used for a change to compensation or the employee’s role. If development teams implement a comments and mentions system, it’s much faster and more compliant for teams to review the same information using a single source of truth.
The future of performance reviews: Why content tools are key
As businesses continue to evolve and grow, it’s important for development teams and HR teams to collaborate on content creation tools. Performance reviews are a key element of human capital management. Making reviews and feedback consistent and clear while eliminating input that can be automated allows leaders and HCM professionals to focus on the important parts of the process. Content tools that integrate collaboration and standardization will help every team involved in the process create a powerful cross-team workflow that encourages and invests in growth and high performance with employees.
Development teams involved in human capital management initiatives, especially those focused on performance review and feedback processes, can be the cornerstone to improving the employee experience while simplifying the work of leaders and HCM teams. By providing powerful content tools for streamlined workflows, these applications allow human capital management and team leads to put the focus on performance management instead of spending energy on the minutiae .
What’s next?
If you're looking to support a structured, efficient, and fair performance management process, the right content tools make all the difference. TinyMCE is an easy to implement, modular rich text editor that offers powerful features like merge tags, AI-assisted writing, and read-only templates to help HR teams and managers streamline performance evaluations.
Ready to transform the performance review process? Try a free 14-day trial of TinyMCE today to see how you can create a scalable performance review process for your organization.
