How to find the best performance management tools

Performance management is one way for today’s businesses to invest in their employees to foster continuous improvement and align employee efforts with organizational goals. Performance management tools are software solutions designed to streamline the evaluation, tracking, and enhancement of employee performance. These tools can help give businesses a more structured way to set goals, provide and implement feedback, and support professional development.

The right performance management system can help your business maintain a motivated and productive workforce by providing clear expectations, regular feedback, and growth opportunities—ultimately leading to increased employee engagement and retention. Performance management software can also offer insights through data and analytics, helping you make informed decisions that help your business succeed.

In other words, choosing the right performance management solution can help your business cultivate a company culture that supports both individual performance and organizational growth. Below, we’ll explore what you should look for in employee performance management tools, including the four key features that set the best software apart.

What is performance management?

Performance management is the process of communicating feedback between managers and employees to ensure alignment with organizational goals and foster continuous improvement. The performance management process involves setting clear expectations, providing regular feedback, and supporting employee development.

Historically, businesses would typically hold a performance review process, often once or twice a year, with formal performance evaluations that assessed each employee’s achievements and areas for improvement. While annual review cycles can be useful, their biggest drawback is that they often miss the opportunity for timely feedback and continuous development.

That’s why today, trends are shifting toward continuous performance management, where feedback and evaluations happen regularly throughout the year. This approach helps employees receive ongoing support and guidance to stay on track toward their goals and continuously improve. The best performance management tools facilitate this always-on performance management through frequent check-ins, real-time feedback, and agile goal setting.

Why performance management matters

Effective performance management is important for a number of reasons, from supporting employee growth to contributing to the overall success and sustainability of your business.

1. Improved employee performance

Having regular performance evaluations and feedback can help your team members understand their strengths and areas for improvement. By identifying and helping your employees develop key competencies, performance management fosters a culture of high performance, where employees are continually encouraged to excel and reach their full potential.

2. Improved retention

Performance management can also improve your employee experience. When employees receive consistent feedback and feel supported in their roles, they’re more likely to stay engaged and committed to your organization, which can lower retention rates, reduce turnover costs, and help you maintain a stable, experienced workforce.

3. Helping employees see a path to upward mobility

​​Performance management plays a vital role in employee development and growth. By setting clear goals and providing regular feedback, managers can help employees see a clear path to upward mobility within the company. This not only motivates employees but also maintains a pipeline of skilled individuals ready to take on higher-level roles within the organization.

4. Taking an active role in company development

Finally, performance management is a way for HR departments to position themselves as strategic partners in their companies’ growth and long-term goals. By aligning employee growth and performance with larger organizational objectives, HR can contribute to the overall strategic planning and development of the company. This means HR becomes one of the stakeholders working toward big-picture goals.

What to look for in the best performance management tools

Rippling Performance Management is built on top of a single source of truth for employee data, which means it seamlessly connects performance management with other Rippling applications, like Recruiting, Benefits, Payroll, and more. 

Below are four key things you should look for in the best performance management software. See how Rippling Performance Management—and its included apps like Goals, Review Cycles, 1:1s and more—delivers in all four areas by seamlessly connecting performance management to your employee information and the rest of your HRIS.

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1. Establishing goals

The best performance management tools should facilitate goal setting by allowing you to define clear objectives and instantly align your company around shared initiatives. With Rippling, the Goals app makes it easy for managers to create goals, allocate them to specific team members, use Goals data when giving feedback, and more. 

Employees can review their individual goals at any time within Rippling (without having to log into a separate system), and company stakeholders can use Rippling’s analytics to report on employee goal and performance data alongside any other data in Rippling—like department, tenure, level, and more. This means unlocking next-level insights into teams’ performance at any time—not just during any performance reviews.

2. Setting milestones to track progress

Alongside regular check-ins, performance management software should offer employee progress tracking and performance metrics to help you monitor key results and KPIs so you get a clear view of your employees’ performance improvement and goal tracking over time.

With Rippling, employees can track their progress toward goals they and their managers set in the Goals app. But what about development milestones that happen between goals and performance reviews? That’s where milestone reviews come in—a feature in Review Cycles that lets you schedule important feedback conversations between employees and managers with greater frequency than formal performance evaluations and goal-setting conversations.

The best thing about milestone reviews? You can trigger them using any data in Rippling. The obvious ones are 30-60-90 day check-ins or the anniversary of a team member’s start day. But you can set them for 30 days after a team or department change, 90 days after a promotion, a month after an employee’s manager leaves the company—just set the rules once and Rippling will automatically send feedback forms to everyone involved in the milestone review process.

3. Providing feedback

The best performance management tools offer 360-degree feedback options, customizable templates for different types of evaluations, real-time feedback, and other features for structured and effective feedback.

With Rippling, not only can you schedule continuous feedback at intervals that make sense for your organization—quarterly, monthly, weekly, or on a custom cadence. You can also customize the review criteria on feedback forms to make sure you measure what’s most important to your business. Rippling Performance Management also offers structured templates to help guide managers through one-on-one performance conversations with their direct reports. And to keep review cycles from lagging, you can quickly spot stragglers and remind them to finish their reviews with one-click reminders.

4. Implementing feedback

Finally, the best performance management tools help you implement feedback effectively. With Rippling, employees can view and revisit their feedback in the same system they use on a daily basis (instead of having to sign into another system). Rippling Performance Management also helps low performers get back on track with development plans and scheduled progress check-ins.

Build high-performing teams painlessly with Rippling

Rippling is the best performance management tool because it easily meets all the needs above—but it goes a step further than that. Because all Rippling apps are natively built on top of our platform, you can seamlessly connect performance data with other Rippling applications, like Recruiting and Payroll. When your performance management is powered by your employee data, that’s what really makes it effortless to set up and sustain your performance management strategy across the entire employee lifecycle.