Why Did We Need to Automate a Performance Review Process?

RLB has a relatively extensive and complex performance review process at our firm. As part of our People Count philosophy and the professional nature of a CPA firm, it’s a process that requires a lot of information flowing from one level to another with complex relationships and roles between teams. Manually keeping track of form submissions, roles and PDF documents would take a lot of manual organization and time on our part.

Before we automated this process, our HR Department would facilitate the exchange of these documents manually (easily over 1000’s of documents while keeping track of who it belongs to and who it should go to).

Well shouldn’t we have an HRMS system to handle that?

We do. A leading and fairly pricey one at that. The problem is you need to conform to their standard processes. Our HR team goes above and beyond for our people and for them, the additional time investment in processing things more manually was well worth it for the user experience of our professional teams.

That’s roughly the time when the RLB Digital team was established and we realized we could make their lives easier by automating the majority of the process.

What does our performance review process need?

We needed to create a system that allows employees to easily review each other (peer-to-peer reviews) and to make it obvious who they were responsible for. The result would be each employee receiving ONE document with reviews from themselves, their peers, and their leaders. (all with differing performance criteria)

Our team broke down the problem into several parts:

• Defining the roles and relationships of employees
• Distributing collection forms using a “relationship matrix”
• Securely collecting and storing performance evaluation data
• Compiling Reviews into unique and customized PDF Documents

Our particular situation may have a more complex set of relationships. In reality, these are the 4 main things any decent performance review system needs to solve. If we can solve them and have ULTIMATE flexibility we are going to get the best of what an HRMS could offer, totally tailored to our needs.

Our HR Team is now able to control everything

Defined Relationships

In theory, each person within a department would report to their department head and interact with their assigned or designated teams. In reality, the workplace is far more complex. Each person wears a variety of hats. As is the nature of encouraging collaboration, the boundaries between teams and departments get blurred. Especially for teams like HR, IT or Marketing whose reach covers a variety of areas. Taking a look at who each team member truly interacts with or supports allows you to get a true-to-life snapshot of their daily interactions. We can therefore accurately collect feedback from the people that work with one another, as opposed to making general assumptions.

Automatic sending of forms

The process of performance reviews is already a long and drawn-out endeavour. Minimizing the bureaucratic tasks helped us reduce time and frustration for our HR team. They were able to better focus their time on offering support to the team leaders conducting the reviews. The time and manpower spent on completing the process was reduced overall making it generally more efficient saving costs and most importantly as seamless as possible for our team.

Automatic collection and compilation

Instead of our HR team spending countless hours pairing feedback data and following up with team members, the automation made it all seamless. Those who were responsible for completing reviews had an easier time accessing the required documents. Additionally, they could complete them without numerous gentle reminders. When they were complete the information was compiled into a singular document for team leaders to review and assess. The work of weeks was completed in a matter of days. We were able to offer valuable feedback to our team and help them set goals before getting back to what we all do best.

We revolutionized the way we support our team through custom automation and integrations. Together, we can help you find a better way. 

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