Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

It seems everyone is talking about the down economy and its impact on HR lately, but who has the time to read it all? We’ve polled major industry analysts and clients, and boiled their wisdom down to three must-read pieces of advice for managing performance in tough times.

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You couldn’t miss the team at the Chicago HR Tech, sporting our new shirts and handing out stickers, post-it notes and other schwag emblazoned with the Version 3 catchphrase: “At last, performance reviews that don’t suck.”

The schwag cupboard’s not quite bare yet, so if you want to get your hands on some then post a reply with your reason as to why you need schwag… If we like it then we’ll send you some. You never know, you might even be lucky enough to lay hands on the elusive jet black Sonar6 tee, suitable for both mother-of-the-bride and after-five.

What a killer week! An unparalleled opportunity to talk to literally hundreds of clients, prospects, competitors, industry analysts and other luminaries. Here are the three big recurring themes from these conversations:

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Samuel Colbert wrote a wonderfully provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks back titled “Get Rid of the Performance Review - It destroys morale, kills teamwork and hurts the bottom line. And that’s just for starters.”

Read it here. It’s over-the-top but it sure highlights the things wrong with traditional approaches to performance reviews, including a common thread of managers, subordinates and HR working cross purposes.

Our answer to this at Sonar6 has always been engagement. Performance management has to be useful. Useful for the manager wanting to build performance in their team, useful to the employee wanting support to improve and progress, and most importantly useful to help the organization make better people decisions.

The sentiment is mirrored by Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion in his equally provocative piece “We Are Doing Performance Management All Wrong” where he advocates performance management should not be about automating the performance review process, but rather about equiping everyone to make better decisions. Also definitely worth a read.

With four New Zealand Post business units – Datamail, Express Couriers, Kiwibank and Converga – already using Sonar6 for talent and performance management, Sonar6 is now cementing a long term business relationship across the New Zealand Post Group.

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Sonar6 Employee Performance Management System Version 3 Enhances User Experience and Engagement; Enables Organizations to Rapidly Implement Great Performance Reviews

Quick Start Component Jump Starts Process and New Transparent Pricing Model Guarantees “No Surprises”

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We’ll be unveiling Sonar6 v3 at the huge HR Technology Conference in Chicago this month, as well as presenting at the Cool New Technologies session. Since the conference this year is showcasing Talent Management, Web 2.0 and Workforce Analytics/Planning, it’s the perfect opportunity to show our exciting new release off!

Sonar6 received the HR Technology award at last year’s conference but we weren’t there to collect. This year we won’t be receiving an award, but we’ll certainly have a lot of great new features on display! If you’re in the area, we’d love you to stop by and visit us on Stand 100. And if you haven’t picked up your ticket yet, simply print out this PDF and present it at the venue for free admission.

Full v3 press release here.

Last month Sonar6 went along to the awards ceremony for the 2008 Design in Business Awards. While we didn’t win, we had a enjoyable evening in some very talented company.

Congratulations to the team from tapware manufacturer Methven for winning this year’s award, and to the Highly Commended AuCom Electronics and phil&teds on their recognition. It was of course an honour to make it to the finals, and we appreciated the opportunity to practice our gracious loser faces!

Big news! Sonar6 have been selected to present at the “Cool New Technologies for HR” session at October’s HR Technology Conference in Chicago. There are four other vendors in this session, all described as mind blowing… Other than Sonar6, there’s BrandGames, InterviewStudio.com, cubeless and Orgnet.com, all companies we love because they are wired into making HR work in an emerging GenY workplace, so it should be a wild time!

Check out Bill Kutiks article on these five vendors.

The design in business awards celebrate companies that have used design to build competitive advantage. In fact their website states: There is growing evidence that companies who strategically use design perform and compete better than their rivals. At Sonar6 we love design! We love evaluating our progress from a user experience standpoint, rather than just measuring the length of our feature list… so we are stoked to be a finalist in the Design in Business Awards.

Traditionally these awards have been dominated by manufacturers - great companies designing bathroom fittings and clothes and furniture and baby buggies - so it is unusual for a software company like Sonar6 to feature, but even more unusually our friends at the very cool online accounting company Xero are also a finalist. Seven finalists in a design awards and two of them are SaaS companies… the world really is changing!