Jim Holincheck recently wrote about some findings from HR Executive’s survey of performance management practices. I’m not surprised that performance management is still on the rise – undoubtedly it will be on the rise for quite some time as new installations keep growing and eventually upgrades and replacements of systems will feed the vendors.
It’s not surprising that there is integration with compensation solutions. It is surprising how many have integrated with staffing and selection. ((Holincheck, Jim, June 20, 2006. “Interesting Findings from HR Executive Magazine’s Survey of Performance-Management Practices and Trends.” Retrieved from http://blogerp.typepad.com on July 3, 2006.))
I’m actually a bit more surprised at this than Jim is. Compensation is a bit harder to integrate with than staffing and selection. First of all, performance plans and compensation plans must be tied together. For example, if you have a bonus plan that states the employee must achieve XYZ factor, XYZ goals must be in the performance plan. Not only must the goals be coordinated, but the employee attributes as well. If the employee has had significant growth in ABC competency, that should go straight into their merit increase evaluation.
On the other hand, I’m not at all surprised that staffing and selection are driving some of the data in performance management. Recruiters routinely pick up data on competencies and skills through the selection process that is otherwise hard to get to. Since this type of information is just data and not process related like the compensation examples above, it should be relatively easy to share the data. So if the recruiting system flags an employee as having DEF skill, it’s a matter of a simple interface into the performance system. The one surprise that I do have here is that most organizations would not simply interface (or integrate) their staffing and selection to performance. Employee attributes found in the selection process would go into the core HRMS upon hire and then fed into the performance management system. I’m guessing this is what’s going on. If not, someone fill me in please.
So Jim is right. It’s not surprising that people are integrating their performance solutions to their comp solutions. It’s what I’d want to do, but in all honesty, I didn’t figure organizations were this far along.
7 responses to “Performance Management Integration”
Performance Management Integration August 2, 2006 on 2:00 am | by Systematic HR Jim Holincheck recently wrote about some findings from HR Executive’s survey of performance management practices. I’m not surprised that performance management is still on the rise – undoubtedly it
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Performance Management Integration with other pieces of the Talent Management Application Suite is indeed a hot topic.
There is currently a group within HR-XML working on this particular topic. Its members include some leading performance management vendors, and HRMS providers.
You might want to take a look at it.
Regards
Romuald Restout
Thanks for the mention. I agree that it is harder to integrate compensation with performance than it is to integrate recruitment with performance. What I was surprised about was that most Gartner clients I speak to have separate solutions for recruiting and performance which would require custom integration to be developed (hopefully we will have more standard interfaces via HR-XML). Wheras many of the clients have purchased or are looking to purchase performance management and compensation management from a single vendor.
I’ve been a bit delinquent with blog updates since announcing HR-XML’s performance management project ( http://www.hr-xml.org/blog/?p=57 ) but I plan to give an interim update soon. Suffice it to say that we have cataloged dozens of different performance system integration use cases. One interesting integration use case that involves recruiting systems and performance management systems pertains to internal hires. Since in some cases the performance management system is the system of record for an employee’s evaluated/rated competencies, why not tap that source of data for internal applications rather than defaulting to the stuff that is in resumes? Thus, when the internal candidate applies, the position application will be populated with the employee’s rated competencies from within the EPM system. I’ve heard of an integration or two like this. This particular scenario isn’t first on our list of use cases to focus on, but we already are on our way to developing a rich collection of datatypes that can be employed flexibly in matching the wide-range of EPM integration use cases. Look for the interim project update in the HR-XML blog later this month.
I have found through the clients I work with that integration with staffing/recruiting and performance is more metrics driven than anything else. For example, a report that extracts what the source of hire and cost is for all performance levels. Powerful stuff that makes an impact.
I realized my last post perhaps was a little off point since it was focused on recruiting/EPM integrations. Regarding the EPM/compensation system integrations, we are discussing those as well. We originally were planning for just a “compensation recommendation” as a final output from an EPM process, but more recently have been discussing a scenario, where an EPM system might provision the compensation system with an objective plan, provide interim results against measures in that plan, as well as provide final results and a compensation recommendation based on results.
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Thanks everyone for the comments.
Chuck: I agree that the performance to compensation interface deserves more than just a score. Often, performance plans drive specific comp plans. In yesterday’s world, it was simply too difficult to have a comp plan comprised of 5 or 6 components since it was difficult to bring the measurement of those components back to the comp reviews. Not only do scores need to be loaded, but all the plans, how performance plans are meaningful to the individual comp plans, but much of the core performance plan set-up as well.
Ideally this is what the talent management suites are doing. Of course it’s understood that an organization may purchase comp, performance and other talent technologoes from different vendors, but the goal is a unified user interface. No matter what systems I’m using, if I’m in the compensation process as a manager, I should be able to drill down intoer performance with a single button click.