Performance Management, Goal Management, 360° Reviews, & Calibration

For an enterprise to catapult to the top of its industry, it must have the right people in place at critical turning points. When corporate organisations leverage SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals to steer their employees in the right direction, those employees will have everything in place to step up and deliver.

Meeting your organisation’s goals is an essential aspect of your teams’ collective responsibilities at work. When your team’s strategy aligns with its goals – and with your organisation’s overall goals – doing the right thing becomes second nature to them. Even during challenging times, they will perform at peak levels, filled with the resilience that can overcome any challenge.

SuccessFactors Performance & Goals helps your employees to perform their best by aligning their strategy and performance with their goals. With its proven system, you can provide them with the kind of continuous feedback and inspired mentoring that drives engagement and increases productivity. Let’s explore all the benefits it can reap for your organisation.

Performance Management

These days, the kind of employees that will help your organisation rise to the top want to take ownership of their role.

SuccessFactors Performance & Goals allows that to happen. When employees engage in their own goal-setting, they take more responsibility for meeting those goals. Ongoing dialogue with you or their direct manager helps them see their progress through another’s eyes, driving a culture of continuous improvement.

The module’s intuitive interface allows you to assess each employee’s performance according to their developmental goals, their performance goals, and their competency in role-specific tasks. You can also factor in insights from direct managers, colleagues, and other stakeholders, such as clients and customers.

A writing assistant provides you with a large library of mentoring and developmental recommendations, while a coaching advisor helps mentors provide actionable feedback and advice to help employees grow into their potential. Another feature, called ‘Legal Scan’, red-flags potentially discriminatory or improper language to guard your organisation against legal issues.

The feature’s robust analytics gives you incisive insights into your employees’ strengths, capabilities, and potential for improvement. Seeing their strengths and capabilities stacked against their weaknesses allows you and their direct manager to look at ways their strengths can help them overcome their problem areas.

If you choose the continuous performance option, you can take a more agile approach, noting goal-specific progress and achievements and providing feedback. With this option, employees, too, can request and provide feedback, allowing them to truly take ownership of their role.

Goal Management empowers employees and management to visualise progress

The module’s Goal Management tool streamlines and automates every step in the process, including:

• Creating goals
• Aligning those goals with an effective strategy that can make them happen
• Monitoring and measuring progress toward corporate, departmental, and personal goals
• Visualising goals in an ordered pattern from strategic to tactical

With Goal Management, direct managers can break down broader corporate goals into SMART ones: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound, with the tool’s Smart Goal Wizard. The wizard provides step-by-step instructions on how to create those kinds of goals, while the Goal Library feature contains more than 500 role- and industry-specific goals, all ready to use for busy managers.

The Goal Categories feature makes it easy for managers to report and track goals, adapting easily to the Balanced Scorecard approach to performance management strategy. Using the Initiatives feature, users can associate their personal goals with corporate, divisional, and departmental goals, engaging them personally with the organisation’s mission.

Goal Management empowers employees to take charge of their careers, one goal at a time. In fact, if your organisation doesn’t yet have SAP’s SuccessFactors Succession and Development Planning module, you can use Goal Management as a career planning tool.

360° Reviews provide you with the complete picture

Employees don’t only interact with people inside the organisation. They are the face of your brand to the outside world. With the 360° Reviews feature, you can collect feedback on their performance from people outside of your organisation as well as people within it. It enables both anonymous and named feedback, providing your reviewers with privacy if needed to avoid interpersonal issues.

360° Reviews allows you to collect both qualitative and quantitative data, displaying it graphically so that you get the complete picture of each employee’s performance. Numeric ratings are possible as well so that you can see how an employee stacks up against others in his or her role as evaluated by the same objective standards.

A writing assistant helps reviewers to craft meaningful yet precise feedback, giving both management and employees an accurate picture of each person’s performance. A feature called ‘Detailed Reporting’ reveals employees’ hidden strengths and blind spots, letting them see in which areas they can bring more value to the organisation.

Configurable workflows allow you to customise the feature to your organisation’s routing process, and you can even send email reminders with its Outlook integration.

Use Calibration to evaluate employees by objective criteria

Designed to drive objectivity in compensation, succession, and performance evaluation, this feature allows management to rank employees in easy-to-read visuals. Choose from four data sources, each tied to a specific decision, including the employee’s talent profile, performance, compensation, and succession.

Its drag-and-drop capability enables you to work quickly, while the dashboards’ intuitive design gives you an aggregate view of each subset of employees. You can set it up easily with only a few clicks, allowing you to choose people from an organisational chart and manage the tool’s security protocols. The Calibration feature provides your organisation’s executives visibility, ensuring that they are aware of departmental management’s decisions and their rationale for making them.

Finally, become familiar with Performance & Goals before you implement it

Like with any solution, it pays to get everyone involved up to speed with the features and operations of Performance & Goals before you implement it. Knowing how to do each task beforehand helps streamline each process when the solution is up and running. Prepare your teams for success, and it will surely follow.

Recruiting and onboarding the right staff is pivotal to any business for ongoing growth and success, but for many businesses, the recruiting and onboarding processes can also come with headaches of their own. The SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting module is designed to eliminate the latter and enhance the former, making the whole process that much easier for everyone concerned.

Let’s take a look at how this benefits your business.

Expand your recruiting reach

When recruiting new personnel, reach is very important. It is unlikely that you have already made up your mind on a particular candidate before the process starts. This means you need to put your job description and job offer in front of as many pairs of eyes as possible, in an effort to secure the right hire.

The SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting module works towards this by helping you to approach recruiting as you would a marketing campaign. You will be able to connect with over 4,000 advertising channels, covering such things as social networks, job aggregation sites and universities, on your way to expanding your reach and broadening your talent pool.

You will also have the ability to craft your own dedicated recruitment site, which will give potential hires further insight into both the role being advertised and the experience of working within your company. All of this contributes to a far more qualified selection of candidates. It also makes it much easier for you to hit your recruitment targets.

Scaled-back process, but with highly effective results

The problem with traditional recruiting and onboarding processes is that they become bloated and convoluted. This results in an inefficient, lengthy process that is a drain on company resources and leaves candidates feeling disenchanted with the whole experience.

The module is designed to help you do things a little differently by scaling back the process to create something more streamlined and efficient. Each step in the process leads logically to the next, and there is little to no wastage of time or resources. 

What’s more, this efficiency does not come at the cost of the results. Built-in tools enable a streamlined, efficient process without losing any key capabilities, while the cloud-enabled platform brings documents and data together in an effective way, even at high volumes. DocuSign integration, for example, enables the signing and storage of paperwork on a remote basis, while job applications can be optimised for mobile devices to make the procedure even more accessible.

Target a competitive candidate experience

SuccessFactors recruiting capabilities are set up in a way that is reminiscent of a sales or acquisitions funnel. By treating your candidates as customers in this way, you are able to offer a far more competitive experience to potential hires and project a far more professional image for your company. This can be instrumental in landing the best personnel whenever you need to fill a new role.

You will be able to set up a swift and efficient recruitment process that eliminates any of the bottlenecks and delays that frustrate potential clients so much. You will also be able to work flexibly within this framework and to reach out directly to candidates for effective support and communication.

This is bolstered by a suite of candidate relationship management tools that are included within the module. With these tools, you can foster engagement on a broad scale, providing mass updates and bulletins that keep your potential hires informed. You’ll also be able to nurture more personal connections with key candidates, which becomes particularly useful as you narrow down your search.

Leverage insight into the process

The SuccessFactors Recruiting module has been developed with data in mind. The developers understand just how important solid insight and understanding is to the recruitment process. As such, the module is designed to capture as much data as possible during the process – data that can then be used to hone and refine recruiting campaigns in the future.

This insight is leveraged via user-friendly interfaces designed to make data management and understanding simple and straightforward. The module also supports this with a number of intelligent tools that allow recruiters to do more during the process. These tools include automated bias scanning for job descriptions, helping you to remove any problematic language from the description, and machine learning capabilities that provide recommendations on salary and other benefits during recruitment. 

Global recruiting with SAP SuccessFactors

Global enterprises need global recruitment capabilities. This means connecting with candidates effectively and profoundly, wherever they are located.

SAP SuccessFactors helps businesses achieve this and supports recruitment processes in 46 languages. With this capability, businesses can create a localised experience for hires in different markets, transforming operations on a truly global scale. As remote work culture enables increasing numbers of organisations to reach a broader market than ever before, this capability provides a huge benefit.

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With the recruiting module, bringing in new personnel becomes significantly easier. You can start looking forward to how you are going to deploy all that new talent rather than worrying about how much the process is going to cost in terms of time, money and resources.