Reviews are the centre of most performance management processes – most often the manager discusses the employee’s performance with them and then captures the results on a form which is then stored in the employee file.

For companies who have simple performance management requirements or those who don’t currently have a form we offer an inbuilt form which allows you to score the employee against metrics like attendance, attitude, punctuality and so on as well as add some custom questions yes no or open question which make up your performance review.

For others, where there is a requirement for more complete review forms, we offer a form builder which allows you to build your own performance management forms (you can build as many as you like and can even link them in the case where your review is made up of more than one form). You can add as many fields as you like including drop-downs with custom answers as well as capture scores and text. In addition, you can invite the employee to fill in specific fields via Self service so the employee can complete their part first as a self assessment or self evaluation before completing the review with their manager.

In both cases, you can also create a review schedule which will send reminders to the employee and manager as well as appearing on their calendars. You can use this for a one off review (for example, arrange a review for next month) or you can also set up recurrence allowing you to schedule a review every month for 6 months, for example.

In addition, to reviews you can add goals which can then be assigned to employees. These goals can either be unique to each employee or you can add goals to a library which can then be used for multiple employees. The employee then has the ability to access their goals via Self service and update their progress.

Combined with the built-in 360 feedback features in Natural HR, goal setting has never been as powerful, or insightful.

Similar to goals you can create a library of competencies and then assign these competencies to both job roles and employees,

Once you know what the required competencies and competency ratings are for a role, you can then easily visually compare the employee current ratings against where they need to be.

Further, if you choose to record the employee desired role you can also see the areas they need to improve in to meet the requirements for their desired role.

HR teams will love the succession planning tool that is build directly into Natural HR.

Once you have all the competencies in place for your employees and your job roles, you can also then use this as part of your succession planning with automatically suggested potential successors highlighted for your key roles so you can choose both the obvious ones but also some less obvious ones for your critical positions.

Natural HR is the perfect human resources tool, but it’s also great for succession planning. There’s no getting away from the fact that this process is as challenging as 360 degree feedback, but it remains a vital part of performance management and without it, businesses and human resources teams simply can’t be fully prepared for the future.

As a further extension to the succession planning process, you can also plot employees on a 9 box grid allowing you to quickly see which employees are ready for promotion and which are less ready. If you work in human resources, you’ll know that access to an approachable 9 box grid tool is rather difficult to come by. Not any more.

You can easily filter the 9 box grid by Manager, Department and/or Site so you can drill down a team level if required. It’s the perfect addition to the succession planning tool within Natural HR and encourages fair, honest feedback that is drawn from real data.

As well as asking the employee for their views on how well they have done, 360 reviews can be a great way to get peer feedback on how well someone is really doing. Within Natural HR, you can send 360 feedback requests via the built-in 360 feedback tool to other users asking them to provide feedback on the employee. You can set an expiry date as well as add additional recipients to the request and, when completed, run a report listing all the feedback provided on the employee.

In human resources, 360 feedback is essential, but it isn’t always particularly easy to gain access to. However, with an approachable 360 feedback tool, HR teams can rely on receiving actionable data from members of staff who may otherwise keep their opinions well hidden.

The less pleasant but equally important part of performance! Natural HR allows you to record performance warnings for your employees along with a start and end date. You can use the provided warning types of Verbal, 1st written, 2nd written, 3rd written and Final warning or you can even add your own warning types should you need to.

Often, warnings of this nature will come from data gathered via the 9 box grid tool or a round of 360 feedback, and because each of these touch points is collated by and managed within the same system, HR teams can be assured of an accurate, fair representation of the the situation.

Often the outcome of a performance management process is you identify your top and bottom performers. Programs are a way of grouping together employees under the banner of high or low performance. Once you have assigned an employee to a program you could then use a specific form built with the form builder to track and record their performance over time – for example, you create a program called Performance improvement program and adding an employee to the program. Once assigned you then create a weekly review schedule for 3 months and at each review use a form called Performance improvement program to track their progress.