Performance Review
A feature to support employees performs a scheduled performance review. Designed to review an employee’s development performance for an entire year and are “official.”
📚 Background
Essentially, two kinds of performance reviews exist, ongoing review and formal reviews. The ongoing review can happen anytime soon after a person completes a specific goal/task. Usually, it is an unstructured review and concerning on how well the person handled the goal/task at hand.
On the other hand, formal reviews are scheduled (usually once a year although quarterly and 6-months reviews are also common) and are typically done by all managers during the same period. They are designed to review an employee’s development performance for an entire year and are “official.”
Client
My role
Product Designer
Product Thinking, Business Process Analysis, Information Architecture, Visual Design, Interaction, Prototyping & Testing, and Documenting UI Elements
Timeline
November 2018 – 2020
Team members
Agus Iskandar · Product Manager
Nico Ariesto Gilani · Product Designer
Christoper Bobby · Front-end
Hari · Front-end
Irsal Ramadhan · Front-end
Reinhart · Front-end
Andy Dharmawan · Backend
💪 Understand the challenge
The performance review process within a company can be challenging to deal with. Both the HR team, employees, and managers have their own obstacles in carrying out the performance review process. Not only is it stressful for all parties involved, but it’s also horribly ineffective. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, and as reported in Slate, “95% of employees are dissatisfied with their company’s appraisal process. What’s more, 90 percent don’t believe the process provides accurate information.”
🔍 Research
The first part of the research was to understand how the performance reviews were conducted in an organization. We gathered some information from our clients on how they did the performance review, their problem when they do the performance review, and what can be improved from their process.
We also talked with our potential client. We tried to find as many cases as possible from a different perspective.
Understanding user & needs
Key takeaways
Based on the user needs from different organizations’ perspectives, we summarized the key takeaways we hope to achieve with the performance review.
- Each organization has a unique and different assessment process, such as what the participants will assess on performance review, different rating scales for conducting assessments, what type of score can be viewed by the participants after the assessment is over, etc.
- Employees, especially managers, have difficulty in providing objective assessments of their subordinates.
- Employees need to view the results of past assessments as a personal review history when they have to review again in the future as a context.
- Managers have to apply similar standards across all employees to ensure that all employees are evaluated on the same criteria – no matter to whom they report.
Define
How can we make this performance review work for all organizations and customizable based on their requirements?
How might we help employees fill the assessment objectively?
How might we make this performance review easy to use when employees doing an assessment and when looking at the results of past assessments?
User
We classify users into three groups: Organization admin, regular employee, and manager, which have different operation’s needs.
Generating IdeasWorking together in a sprint, we make ideations, validate ideas, and solve significant challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with the product, customer success, and engineering team.
Design concept
- Make a composer’s performance review that is modular to customize it according to the organization’s needs. There are three main modules to support or run a performance review:
- Track template is a feature that allows the admin to specify what attributes the reviewer will assess in a performance cycle. Organization admin can create new track templates, view and archive existing track templates.
- Rating template is a feature that allows the admin to set the rating scale along with the formula. Admin will select this template rating according to the template track feature.
- The performance review cycle feature allows admins to create performance reviews by specifying phases and track templates, setting performance review schedules, selecting participants, etc.
- Provide feature performance calibration. Calibration drives truth into performance reviews, creating a more honest appraisal of an employee’s work.
- Provide source evidence section for managers. There will be a panel located on the right that will show contextual information according to which part of the manager review they are currently viewing. It will help managers to review objectively if they can view review results from their reviewee’s peer, upward, and self-review.
- Provide pages to view the results and answers of the performance reviews that have been done. Employees can also export the results to PDF.
High Fidelity Design
Multiple track options
We provide a variety of track options and rating types provided by Happy5 performance review. We are adapting to the needs of organizations that have different needs.
Help make an objective assessment.
Source evidence allows employees, especially managers, to provide objective assessments by displaying the history of the employees being assessed, both from performance reviews and users’ daily activities (Happy5 Culture app).
Transparent assessment results
Assessment results can always be accessed by all employees easily. In addition, the Employee can also export the results of the performance review in PDF form.
Customizable and manageable admin page
An interactive dashboard page that makes it easy for organizational admins to create and manage performance reviews.
Calibration for an honest appraisal of an employee’s work
It is a process in which multiple managers discuss employees’ performance ratings, thus ensuring an objective assessment is made based on past performance and other employees with similar job descriptions. In addition, calibration can identify a mentoring opportunity, triggering the manager to dig deeper into the source of the skill and highlight growth opportunities.
HandoffWe separate the handoff file based on module and feature, so we can maintain it more manageable. We make sure that assets are passed on appropriately. Include design files, documentation, and guidelines.
Tools
⭐️ Result
This feature is one of the essential features of Happy5 Performance. This feature brought us one of our biggest clients, BCA and BRI, the two largest banks in Indonesia. We also hear success stories from our clients, especially the human resource department team, when using this feature, speeding up their appraisal process in the organization.
Learnings
Design can continuously be improved; it’s essential to know when to ship and wait for user feedback to further iterations. Until now, the Happy5 performance review has already done many iterations to deliver a better and much better product. We also always listen to feedback from both new and existing clients. Their input is beneficial for the development of this performance review feature.
From this project, we also understand the importance of making documentation as early as possible. Good documentation will significantly facilitate the product team, customer success, and engineers in developing this feature further. Documentation can also help our new clients as a reference for the onboarding process.