Performance Appraisal in Microsoft Teams – Your Employees Will Love It!

If you are in the business world, you might not like the term “performance appraisal” as it is a very hard process to start with. The performance appraisal process is not the favorite process among employees. But, good news! There are some ways in which you can make this non-interesting process more interesting and appealing.

Do you know that you can integrate your performance appraisal with Microsoft Teams? An integrated solution will make it easier to track the completed appraisals and will also save you from the burden of trying to increase the adoption of your performance appraisal system.

Meanwhile, you can also track previous appraisals and check out their improvement in terms of their work. To tell you more about the integration of Microsoft Teams and performance appraisal, let’s start from the basics.

What is Performance Appraisal?

In case you are not familiar with the term, here is the simplest performance appraisal definition: Performance appraisal, in other words, performance evaluation is the performance review of an employee. It is a very general term but it has a very detailed process to follow.

Companies are using performance appraisal in terms of evaluating the company’s growth by checking the contributions of employees and reviewing their progress to reward the most contributing employee for motivation.

As many performance appraisal methods there are in the world, there is an equal amount of ways to fail. There are some reasons why your performance appraisal system might fail. Let’s talk about them, shall we?

How beneficial are performance appraisals?

Performance appraisals are a powerful tool and motivator for both employees and organizations. Firstly, they provide a structured framework for evaluating individual performance, offering employees valuable feedback on their overall performance.

Not only do performance appraisals provide an overview of present performance, but they also give insight as to future career goals. This feedback serves as a foundation for personal and professional development, empowering employees to enhance their skills, address weaknesses, and set meaningful career objectives.

Additionally, performance appraisals provide an open space for transparent communication and alignment between employees and managers, clarifying expectations, and ensuring that organizational objectives are effectively communicated and understood.

Performance appraisals also play a crucial role in driving organizational success by enabling managers to identify high performers, recognize achievements, and allocate resources effectively. This evaluation contributes to informed decision-making in an organization.

Ultimately, performance appraisals cultivate a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and innovation, and enhance employee engagement, contributing to organizational excellence and long-term success.

What are the Most Common Causes For the Failure of Performance Appraisal Systems? 

It’s not always easy to set a perfect performance appraisal system. Like everything has its own flaws, so does employee performance appraisals. But this time, the reasons are more defined and certain than other things.

If your personal appraisal system doesn’t succeed or give you what you need, there might be some points that you may have missed or overlooked:

• Lack of Leadership Support: If the upper management doesn’t recognize the value of performance appraisal processes, they don’t raise awareness about the importance of the process either. That leads to the disowning of performance appraisals by the employees.

• Bad Software Selection or Lack of Software Use: If the selected performance appraisal software doesn’t meet the needs of the company, even if they make performance appraisals, these evaluations can’t move the company forward. Also, if you don’t use any tool to make performance appraisals at all, things are going through Excel or PDF which requires manual effort and it may lead to irregularities in the contents. Please check our blog article that talks about the Top 5 Reasons to Digitize Your Performance Review Process.

• Performance Appraisal Template issues: The forms which are used during performance evaluation processes might not reflect the real performance. The HR teams might not create these forms as a full reflection of the real performance. Learn more about the best practices in performance review from our blog post.

• Lack of Transparency: If the process of performance management is not transparent enough, employees might find it hard to trust the outcomes. Meanwhile, they might not have any idea about the further steps after their form submission.

• Lack of integration: If the performance management system hasn’t been integrated to the employee’s everyday life and the products they use, the employees may avoid creating usernames and passwords in separate applications and may not visit the software to complete their performance management temples.

Now, let’s talk a bit more about the last point. Which applications can performance management systems be integrated into? Here are some of them: Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, Asana, Cisco Webex Teams and etc.

The most highlighted and preferred application among the mentioned ones above would be Microsoft Teams as it has more users around more than 270 million, monthly, according to Microsoft.

Performance Appraisal in Microsoft Teams – Benefits of Using an Integrated Solution 

Microsoft Teams is a huge and beneficial platform that has different purposes of use. It is considered a hub for teamwork where you can share documents, organize meetings, connect your calendar and etc.. Here are some benefits of using Performance Appraisal Software integrated into Microsoft Teams:

• You, users, will not need to create a separate username and password if the used solution supports “single sign-on (SSO)”.
• If the performance management solution uses GRAPH API, the tool can fetch your org chart from Microsoft Teams so that you don’t need to upload your org chart one more time.

• If the performance appraisal tool works inside of Microsoft Teams, your employees won’t need to memorize the URL of a different application.

• Users might get more detailed and enriched notification options. Standard solutions that are not integrated would only offer the option of sending notifications only through mail, in integrated solutions you can also send notifications to users with the bots in Microsoft Teams.

• The process would be much more transparent when the employees are using performance management software that is integrated with Microsoft Teams, as they will know the next step after submitting their self-review.
• When you use an application that is integrated with Microsoft Teams, you might not need separate mobile applications for performance management software as the integrated applications would work inside the application of Microsoft Teams’ mobile app itself.

Software for Performance Appraisal in Microsoft Teams 

As we just checked the benefits of using Performance Appraisal Software integrated into Microsoft Teams, now we can check some applications that you can use for performance appraisal which are also integrated with Microsoft Teams.

Teamflect

Teamflect is an all-in-one performance appraisal software – exclusively built for Microsoft Teams. With Teamflect, you can create goals/OKRs, organize 1-on-1 meetings, manage tasks, conduct performance reviews, and share feedback and recognitions. Teamflect is integrated into Microsoft Teams and it allows you to easily access both applications with a single username and password.

The tasks, 1-on-1 meetings, goals, recognitions, and feedback you create in Teamflect can be tracked through Microsoft Teams. In addition, with Teamflect’ s Review module, you can select the review templates, reviewers, reviewees and start the cycle.

You can make your performance review process more intuitive with this tool and your employees will love it. The performance appraisal templates Teamflect offers have a self-review function that allows employees to review their own performance.

Quantum Workplace

Quantum Workplace is a software that help managers or leaders to create a connection between the engagement and performance of their employees with user-friendly tools. Quantum Workplace’s integration provides solution to deliver notifications of employee surveys, setting and tracking goals, real-time feedback and peer-to-peer recognition, one-on-one meetings and business impact analysis. However, this software doesn’t support single sign-on, you can only contact with bots and you can’t open the app inside the Teams application.

Workdove

WorkDove is a performance management solution which has the full package of features. This solution helps to build greater teams for more effective results with recognition. You can connect your existing account in WorkDove with Microsoft Teams and you can react to the messages.

Culture amp

Culture amp is also a solution which you may use but keep in mind that it doesn’t support single sign-on and you can only open it as a bot. You can’t use the application’s features if you open it on Teams as a single tab.

Conclusion

Microsoft Teams, with the right additions, can function perfectly as a performance appraisal tool. With all the third-party performance appraisal tools available in the Microsoft Teams ecosystem, Microsoft Teams performance management has never been easier.

While there are many incredible performance appraisal tools available to users, the single best performance appraisal tool for Microsoft Teams is Teamflect. Making the wrong choice when going through performance appraisal tools is one of the top answers when people ask “Why do performance reviews fail?”.

Performance appraisals are quite important but let’s face it, the applications to track performance appraisals are also as important as these evaluations themselves. Yes; you need to make regular performance appraisals in order to see the outcomes of your work or the impact of your business growth but, if you don’t use a software solution while creating and making these appraisals, it might cause irregularities.

Using digital solutions and integrations would make your job easier and quicker, provide you a faster solution. Are you using or planning to use Microsoft Teams in your personal appraisal processes?