Top 10 Best Features of Oracle HCM Performance Management

Over the last few decades, automating Human Resource (HR) processes have been a trend in this digitized world. Organizations are now looking for solutions in attracting and engaging talent global workforce and creating the best employee experience. This brings in attention for companies to have robust HR systems which can seamlessly deliver global HR capabilities in a standalone platform. Oracle HCM suite is one such latest application which aims to provide different HR modules that are highly configurable to suit one’s business needs.

At present, several organizations are having challenges in streamlining their HR processes and if you are a company who is facing performance management issues such as,

• Solutions to reduce manual jobs
• Difficulty in tracking the performance cycle or
• Having a substandard process of tracking employee competencies/goals

1. Goal Management – gives employees the autonomy to define performance and development goals, and allows organizations to perform goal-based evaluation

2. Worker Profile Management – Offers to track employee competencies, skills and accomplishments that can be used for the performance evaluation.

3. Performance Document – It consists of various sections like goals, competencies, feedback that are extracted from other modules. This document is associated to each of the employee for evaluating their performance on annual/semiannual basis.

This modern HR system allows your organization to configure the performance management module based on your HR practices. If your managers are having difficulties in tracking employees’ progress in their assigned goals or don’t maintain a standard performance document, then this module can help you overthrow these hindrances.

An overview of what the module can offer to various roles in your organization is listed as below:

• As a business leader, you might be looking for measurable ways to track organization performance and this module has embedded business intelligence which provides performance metrics in real-time.
• As a HR manager, it allows you to handle various HR processes at ease. It also provides flexibility to setup and maintain performance documents/template based on the business unit.
• As Project manager, it offers a gamut of functionalities to track the performance of your team, rate competencies/goals, maintain performance documents, and thereby improve the overall evaluation process.
• As an employee, one can self-evaluate their performance, see their progress, receive continuous feedback, update the performance document to include competencies from both their job profile and performance goals.

From the three major components that contribute to performance management module, let us understand how employee evaluation is carried out using a performance document. (Goal management module and workers profile management will be covered in the upcoming blogs)

How does a performance document work?

The performance document is designed using a performance template. It Is configured by project manager or HR specialist and shared to manager and employees for evaluation. The document is organized in the form of sections and the data for each of these sections are populated from other major modules.

How are they integrated with goals and profiles module?

This document has information about the competencies and goals which can either be included directly or extracted from worker job profile and goal management module respectively. However, they can also be taken from the content/goal library. Once the document is been evaluated, workers’ profile gets updated with new proficiency levels of their competencies and skills.

Features of Performance Document

Sections

The performance document consists of cluster of sections and each section has set of tasks associated to it. They can be configured according to your HR practices. For example,

Set Goals section require one of these tasks:

• Performance goals
• Development goals

Worker self-evaluation requires the following tasks:

• Profile content for competencies
• Performance goals
• Development goals

Similarly, there are other sections like competencies, questionnaire, overall summary, manager/worker final feedback.

Each section is populated from the other modules (Goal/ Profile) or can also be manually added while creating the document.

Section ratings and weightage

The document allows you to configure the ratings for each of the section. As manager or employee, one can give the ratings and comments, based on which the application calculates section-wise and overall ratings. It also provides the option of selecting the calculation rule and the rating model for each of the section. As HR specialist, you can define calculation rule to determine the overall ratings given by the manager or employee. Some of the predefined rules include average, sum, band and the fast formula methods which can be used for evaluating the performance document. Weightage can also be associated to each of the sections and this helps in highlighting the sections which are more important than the others. The ratings derived from the performance document is been updated to the compensation module as well as the worker profile module.

Once the performance document is configured, they are rolled out to the employees and manager to perform the evaluation. The application provides a customized experience for employees and managers to view the document and evaluate the performance.

Additional features

• Matrix Management – The application enables your organization to involve multiple managers like project manager, team manager, functional manager to evaluate, submit feedback about the employees. This gives a complete and clear picture about the performance of employees.
• Eligibility Profiles – This is used to restrict availability of performance documents to a specific population based on criteria you set up (such as department/location/grade)
• Writing Assistant – This enables managers to write comments about competencies and proficiency levels of his team. While giving the feedback, the manager can also choose the predefined developmental tips associated with each competencies and proficiency level.
• Participant feedback – It is also called as multi rater feedback, where peers or project managers are added as participants to be a part of the evaluation process. This enhances the final evaluation of employees. The participants are defined in the template and their roles are defined to provide ratings, comments as well as send their response to the questionnaire (a set of questions defined to evaluate the performance). This brings in transparency to the system and aids the managers in tracking and maintaining the feedback of his team.
• Most of employees today prefer receiving an on-going feedback at regular intervals to ensure their progress in achieving goals. This functionality can be achieved by using Check-in feature available in this module. It enables employees and managers to have simple, 1-on-1 discussions using any device i.e. desktop, tablet or smartphone. They can be initiated by employee or manager at any time to record for quarterly, monthly, or weekly conversations.

In the latest updates (18a,18b) of release 13 Oracle HCM, there are few additional features brought in performance module and some of them are mentioned below:

• Introduced Deep Links feature that allows a manager or employee to navigate to the performance document directly by clicking on the link available in the notification.
• An employee can also now receive critical alerts on completion of performance evaluation if there are any pending task and if the due date is passed for completing the task. The manager needs to enable alerts for the respective section in the performance template.

Summary

Organizations undergoing an HR transformation, need to have a clear understanding on how their HR processes can be accommodated in cloud. Solutions like Oracle HCM cloud can embark organization’s journey in adopting the latest innovations, keeping the business agile, modern and also become a strategic tool for managing talent. For an organization who is looking for an application that can be tailored to fit your performance culture, Oracle Performance Management module can offer deeper and meaningful insights about organizations’ performance and help you make the right business decisions.

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