Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

It’s Christmas again, and this year Sonar6 descended on Waiheke Island for a day of R&R.

Highlights included marathon beach volleyball games, some quite ‘refreshing’ swims, a very civilised game of croquet, and a splendid (if sandy) rendition of the Sonar6 gummi. We also tried a bit of hunter-gathering and netted a fair haul of pipis for the BBQ: classic kiwi beach tucker!

True to style, we couldn’t let the day go without some form of friendly competition – and this time we got our hands on some weaponry. The stars of that show were definitely Kai and Jonny, who managed to blitz the competition in skeet shooting and archery respectively – both on their first ever attempts.

And of course, special congratulations must go to John for winning the Loud Shirt competition; the shorts were just a bonus.

Merry Christmas from all at Sonar6; have a healthy and happy New Year!

We are starting to see a theme across several commentators recently: That the economic downturn will force an expanded role for talent management.

To quote Josh Bersin’s excellent blog on the topic: 

The critical problems organizations face in 2009 are very different: rapid market changes, restructuring, downsizing, mergers and acquisitions. These problems not only create a need for better alignment and leadership, but a heavy focus on rapid talent planning, employee mobility, rapid skills development, and business agility. 

Today I hear more and more HR and business leaders telling me “we have our talent management strategy well underway” but what we really need is a “People Strategy.”

Read Josh’s full article here.

Sonar6 has made a name for itself as one of the most accessible and user friendly performance review systems available - but that didn’t happen by chance. We spend a huge amount of time researching and refining our interface, and with an audience as diverse as ours, that’s something we can’t afford to get wrong.

In this article Catherine Bircher, Sonar6’s Quality Lead, discusses some of the challenges we face when it comes to designing our UI, and what we’re doing to make Sonar6 v3 easy for everyone to use.

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Well, we finally did it. After playing Sardines for a couple of years, we’ve moved to a bigger office space – we’ve now got room to swing whole families of cats!

Only joking; we love cats.

Sonar6’s Head Office is now at 23a Union Street, Freemans Bay Auckland; an invigorating 5 minute walk from our old offices and right by the Wellington Street on-ramp. We’re still getting everything set up and stored away (and figuring out where to put the Wii), but if you’re in the neighbourhood, drop in and say hi!

Head Office contact details:

23a Union St
Freemans Bay
Auckland 1010
New Zealand

PO Box 911461
Victoria Street West
Auckland 1142

Phone: 0800 SONAR6 / 09 968 2133
Fax: 09 929 3393

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 Culbert 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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