We’ll be introducing some improvements to the review completion screen in our next product update (due for release in time for Christmas), so it will provide even more useful and up-to-date feedback on review progress.

When you load your Team’s Performance Reviews, you’ll see a screen similar to this one:

Along with overall completion bars for each review phase, you’ll get more detailed information on the progress of your team’s reviews, self assessments and 360° reviews. Additionally, you’ll be able to share reviews with your manager or employees and send email reminders and 360 review invitations (if you’re using Sonar6 360°!) all from the one screen.

You can also access this completion screen by clicking the ‘Details’ button next to the progress bar in the bottom right panel of your Team’s Performance Review screen.

These improvements will really streamline your managers’ review workflows – keep an eye out for them!

Now you can invite anyone to have their say at review time: as long as they have an email address, they can contribute to a 360º review. Check out the details.

As many of you know, our labs have been hard at work building a much-expanded 360° review functionality for Sonar6. The core principal behind 360° in Sonar6 is that it’s really useful getting feedback from others for many things that are measured in a performance review. For instance, if I am rating a salesperson on how well they work with customers, it’s great to get feedback directly from customers.

One of the configurable aspects of our new system is that 360° feedback can either be anonymous, or can be attributed to the person who gave the feedback.

There is a tradition of 360° feedback being anonymous. When 360° reviews were primarily used as part of a leadership development framework, it was thought that anonymous feedback would be more candid. Of course, some will tell you it was also full of inaccuracies and injustice!

Newer uses of 360° (as in Sonar6) are less about developing leaders and more about gathering input into a performance review process for all staff. In these scenarios we are seeing lots of companies go down an open feedback path, believing that any challenges in getting candid feedback are outweighed by using the process to improve team dialog.

We thought we’d make a list of the benefits of each approach from our research.

Why anonymous is good

1. People are more likely to give candid, objective feedback
2. Reduces the likelihood of punitive consequences for poor ratings (especially from subordinates)
3. Allows people with less forthright personalities to give feedback
4. Allows management to couch potentially bad or damaging feedback

Why attributed is good

1. If you are accountable for your feedback, you will put more effort into providing it
2. Prevents “back-stabbing”
3. Encourages team dialog and getting feedback out into the open
4. Removes some of the ability to “game” the system
5. Some opinions are more important than others (eg a close work-mate or a big customer), so it is useful to know
6. It is easier to address an issue if you can understand where the feedback comes from
7. Often the people with the strongest opinion (either very positive or very negative) want their feedback to be attributed
8. It doesn’t feel like your destiny is controlled by a group of anonymous people

It was probably best summed up by one manager I talked to who said “The ideal is an environment where you can give direct open feedback, safe in the knowledge that you won’t be somehow punished for it.”

I am really interested in opinions on this. Please comment!

Some interesting results from our People and Performance Audit, on the use of 360 degree feedback in different industries and different company sizes. I’ll let the pictures do the talking…

Prevalence of 360 by organization size:

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Aggreko, the global leader in the provision of rental power and temperature control services, will implement Sonar6’s online performance management solution internationally.

Sonar6 will provide Aggreko with a single point of performance information for the entire company, offering online performance reviews, self-assessments and development planning.

Aggreko’s North American subsidiary has used Sonar6 for managing the performance of almost 500 employees since early 2009. The decision to roll Sonar6 out internationally was made on the back of the existing relationship and continued positive results from the system’s straightforward and user-friendly reviews.

Aggreko Global HR Director Siegfried Putzer says the decision to introduce Sonar6 globally will encourage individual and company growth: “(It is) a simple, meaningful online performance management tool that engages employees and enables managers to give valuable feedback, and to have discussions around existing capabilities and future development.”

This expansion will position Sonar6 as the performance management vendor of choice for Aggreko’s global community. The international nature of the implementation will also see reviews and training conducted in 6 languages within the Sonar6 system.

Sonar6 Head of Experience Mike Carden says Aggreko’s decision to use Sonar6 across its entire business is an exciting one.

“It’s a true success story: Aggreko started out with fewer than 200 employees profiled in Sonar6, and now the majority of its 4,000 staff globally will be using the system. It goes to show that if you have a really useful system delivering useful results without costing the earth, companies are going to want to use it.”

We’ve probably all worked at companies that have produced a handbook of policies and procedures: from what to wear, to how many days leave you get on the death of your grandmother’s cousin’s best friend’s dog, to why you’re not allowed to access Facebook, or Twitter, or YouTube.

Most of these policies are unnecessary most of the time; most employees will toe the line whether they’ve memorised the handbook or not (and they haven’t). Chances are you used common sense when employing the people who are now working for you, so why not assume they have the same facility? Unless you’re supremely dedicated to the cause, you’re unlikely to create a policy for every foreseeable situation, so why not make your life (and your employees’ lives) easier?

There are increasing calls for simplicity in HR policy – provide broad guidelines that assume your employees don’t need too much hand-holding: ‘be professional’, ‘be respectful, ‘don’t embarrass the company’. Possibly the most famous case of minimalist HR policy is US department store Nordstrom, which gave new employees a 5×8 card inscribed with the company’s one and only HR policy: Use good judgement in all situations.

While they’ve necessarily added more detail over the years (we live in a litigious age), the principle remains the same: treat employees like adults, capable of rational thought and possessed of common sense. Most of them probably are, and you’ll have more time to deal with the few who aren’t.

That would be Sonar6 graphic designer Kai Crow: world famous on bus stops around NZ.

Kai’s mountain biking prowess recently scored him a photo shoot for Mizone, which involved “4 hours of me hopping around on the back and front wheels of my bike from various angles and riding around on a skate ramp til I got dizzy.”

The resulting poster can now be viewed in various public places around the country. No word yet on whether we’re getting one for the office…

Sonar6’s People screen will probably look familiar even if you haven’t used the software – it’s where you build the organizational chart that represents your company’s structure.

It’s a key part of getting going in Sonar6, so our first v3 Feature Showcase focuses on the basics (and not-so-basics) of using the People Tree to set up and maintain your company, teams and employees.

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Ok the dust is well and truly settled from Chicago, so it’s time to reflect!

As always, it was a truly great show. It’s really rewarding to catch up with so many analysts, bloggers and other industry players in one place. In fact, I heard the HR Tech Conference described this year as the village square of HCM! We also caught up with lots of vendors we like, including my two top picks for creative rethinking and repackaging of HR processes: www.smartrecruiters.com – the FREE applicant tracking system, and www.rypple.com – for continuous personal feedback.

As you know, we didn’t have a booth at the tradeshow this year. Instead we went guerrilla, and it was a hit: Sonar6 wins the Guerrilla Marketing Award from HRCapitalist! Obviously not being tied to a booth meant we got to get around and talk to more people, and we found it really paid off.

It also seems that the influencers are starting to cotton on to our business model, as discussed by Brian Sommer in SMART Selling in the SaaS World. We’ve always maintained that we want to democratize performance and talent management – and to do that, it’s important Sonar6 is transparent and accessible to the people who need it. And who wouldn’t want to be called out for bringing “fresh light to the employee and team performance management darkness“?

Now for my only gripe.

As an industry we have some of the most confusing messaging I have ever come across. Honestly, I walked around the tradeshow and I couldn’t work out what a heap of the vendors actually did – it must be awful for customers!

We keep it easy though: we do performance reviews that don’t suck.

To lead a successful company you don’t need to be an expert in programming, in tax accounting, in surveying or construction: but you do need to hire people who are.

As ad guru David Ogilvy put it: If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

But it’s not enough to just hire giants. You need to be prepared to manage giants, and to keep them from getting dragged down by any dwarfs that may be lurking in your ranks. If you want them to deliver big, you have to build systems that enable and encourage giant achievements – and you need to give credit where credit is due.

Hiring giants is a great strategy from a succession point of view: if each manager hires a team of people smarter than they are, there’s a strong pool of potential successors. You want someone great to take over when you step down; it’s much easier than trying to groom a dwarf for greatness.