                            Performance Now
                          Reviewed by Chip Cox

    Anyone who has been a supervisor or manager over other employees
knows the problems associated with employee performance. One of the best
tools for dealing with poor employee performance is a performance
review. Most of the managers I know who do performance reviews,
considered them a waste of time for good employees and a headache for
employees who need counseling. At first I shuddered when I thought about
another package to try and make me do my performance reviews. One of my
main problems was providing consistent review criteria to my employees.
Not providing consistent review criteria to employees with the same job
description can probably be more damaging to your company from a legal
perspective than not doing performance reviews at all. KnowledgePoint
has done an excellent job in making creditable performance reviews less
of a burden for managers.

    Performance Now starts out by making you create a form for your
various job descriptions. When creating this form you can select from
many different categories on which to review your employees performance.
These categories range from physical appearance to customer service and
many things in between. Not all categories will be relevant to every job
description. Select only those that are relevant. This same form can now
be used to gauge all employees falling into this job description. For
example as a technical support manager I have two levels of support
personnel reporting to me. The first level is my entry level support
staff. They are required to have good product knowledge, communication
skills, and customer support skills. The second level support personnel
are required to possess problem solving skills, initiative, and
supervisory skills in addition to those skills possessed by the entry
level support staff. Rating levels between 1 and 5 can be assigned
names. This is primarily used to word text in the review the way your
organization wants it. Finally you decide what employee information is
to be displayed on the form. The information maintained for each
employee is extensive and even includes the last review date and a
planner for the next review date.

    After building the performance review form it is time to start
entering employee information. Keep in mind that the information you get
out of your system is only as good as the information you put into it.
If you don't keep the employee information current as the period between
performance evaluations goes by, you will have a lot of catchup work to
do when employee evaluations come again. Performance now makes recording
this information relatively easy. Not only does it keep up with salary
increases and other pertinent employee record information, it also keeps
up with an employee event log where notes on employee events both good
and bad can be kept. These events are useful in providing backup
information to a review.

    After your employee information has been input the next task is one
of keeping the information current and logging all incidents relating to
the employee both good and bad. It's terrible when you have an employee
who has a major oops right before a review. All the employee can think
about is the oops and often times it's foremost in the managers mind as
well. Having the log of good and bad things the employee has done allows
the manager to look back and see all of the good things the employee has
done in the past recognizing the oops for what it was or possibly
recognizing a disturbing trend. All this makes the review process fair
to both employee and employer.

    Now it's time to do an employees review. For each element selected
for review several questions will be asked. These questions are answered
on the 1 to 5 scale you selected earlier. As questions are answered
appropriate text is entered into a text box on the screen. After the
text has been entered it can be edited as needed then pasted into the
appropriate section of the performance review. If the answers to the
questions result in an extremely good or poor rating in that element,
suggestion boxes will be displayed requesting that you input additional
information from the employee file to backup the information. If a poor
review, suggestions are made indicating that information be provided on
how the employee might resolve the problem. After all elements have been
entered, Performance Now progresses to the Summary section and Plans for
improvement section. The plans for improvement section is very nice in
that it provides suggestions for improving each element that was
included in the review. The reviewer simply checks the boxes with the
suggestions needed.

    One nice feature of Performance now especially useful to those of us
without a strong background in human resources is the advice button.
This button brings up a Windows help file full of advice in how to do
effective and constructive employee performance reviews. I only see two
negatives in Performance now. First I would like to have the ability to
scale the elements in the review forms by percent of job. I would like
to assign a multiplier of say 50% for customer support since I feel it's
more important that physical appearance which I might assign 5%. I would
like to be able to assign a 0% multiplier for my entry level support
personnel in the elements dealing with the higher level support
personnel. This lets me review them on the same elements as the second
level support personnel and show them what they need to do to progress
to that next level without lowering their review score due to elements
they are not responsible for yet. Secondly is a negative I see in many
different "corporate" products today. Performance Now needs to have the
ability to exchange employee information with various other employee
database products. There is not enough time in any of our work days to
do double entry of data. Salary information entered into a payroll
program should be accessible either through data import or through a DDE
link with Performance Now. Systems which do not allow for data exchange
quickly just become "another system I have to maintain". In my case the
benefits derived from Performance Now outweigh the double entry
drudgery. But I can always dream.

    Performance Now is one product in a suite of products from
KnowledgePoint. Other products include Descriptions Now and Policies
Now. KnowledgePoint has taken a giant step to making the management of
human resources easier for everyone.

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