Top 7 Performance Management Software

For any business or organization to thrive and stay ahead of the competition, empowering employees to perform their best is crucial. 

Employees can only perform at their optimal potential when provided with proper, detailed, and genuine feedback to further improve and hone their capabilities. 

While employers and managers can review and provide timely feedback to their employees throughout the year, most organizations use an appraisal system to evaluate their yearly performance and provide comprehensive feedback. 

However, the problem with traditional appraisal systems is that they are inefficient and inflexible. They also tend to discourage employees due to reasons like delayed feedback, a one-size-fits-all approach that neglects individual strengths and contributions, and a lack of transparency, leading to an ineffective performance management process. 

In fact, a survey suggests that 33% of employees prefer continuous feedback rather than annual traditional reviews. 

So, how can companies achieve this while being efficient and accurate? This is where robust performance management software comes into play. 

In this article, we’ll see what an ideal performance management tool is, its benefits for both employees and employers and how employers can choose the right fit for their business. 

What is Performance Management Software? 

Performance management software makes it easier for employers to manage, track, and improve employee performance to boost their productivity. It helps businesses with tasks like

• Goal setting and monitoring
• Continuous feedback
• Multi-stakeholder feedback and reviews

This modern approach replaces the traditional method of using Google Docs and spreadsheets to monitor employee performance, which worsens performance by one-third. 

This is why around 81% of HR leaders are changing their performance management system—which is shifting from qualitative numeric ratings to ongoing, forward-looking feedback systems. 

Moreover, the continuous feedback process allows employers to track their employees’ performance and provide ongoing feedback in real-time—allowing them to meet their business priorities and goals and build a skilled and productive workforce. 

7 Best Performance Management Tools For Your Business’s Success

• Darwinbox for robust AI-powered performance management, flexibility, regional compliance, all-in-one solution, continuous feedback and MSF, customizable PM workflows, and tight integration with AI-powered Talent Management
• Workday for seamless integration with HR, finance, and talent ecosystems
• Oracle for its AI-powered predictive analytics and real-time data synchronization
• SAP SF for integration with SAP modules and embedded learning and talent modules
• Lattice for fostering feedback-driven and employee engagement features
• Leapsome for combining performance management with learning and development 
• 15Five for simplicity and focus on employee well-being and employee-centric features

59% of employees believe that traditional performance reviews have no impact on their individual performance. To ensure your employees don’t feel the same way, here’s a deep dive into the top performance management software mentioned above so you can choose the best-suited solution for your organization. 

Consolidated Performance Management Solutions

1. Darwinbox

Darwinbox is a robust and dynamic AI-powered performance management platform designed to enhance employee engagement, streamline reviews, foster a high-performance culture of continuous feedback, and align with organizational goals. 

It’s a modern, flexible, and user-friendly solution that helps employees to focus on their goals and get the work done. Let’s see how Darwinbox incorporates employee goals, reviews, and feedback in its performance management software. 

Goal setting

Darwinbox allows managers and employees to collaborate on setting up employee goals with an AI-powered goal generator by defining individual objectives, competencies, skills at role, and custom measurement scales. You can also cascade goals to ensure seamless alignment with the goals and track business progress. 

Besides, the Goals Explorer makes it easy for employees to learn about setting goals. It supports all types of goals, including company, team, BU, and individual goals, as well as Project and Dynamic team goals. 

Reviews

Darwinbox automates performance reviews and offers various options, including customizable performance review cycles, project-based assessments, quarterly reviews, and annual reviews. 

It also provides you with the necessary tools to engage, record, and nudge employees at critical times through configurable check-ins, making PM an everyday process rather than a one-time annual event. 

With a flexible review construct, you can perform both performance reviews (based on competencies, goal achievements, etc.) and talent reviews (based on skill assessment) with AI-powered talent management. The review structure can be set up based on competencies, skills, goals, N-grid, or other custom parameters. 

Feedback 

Managers and employees can exchange real-time, continuous feedback on any goal or sub-goal. This fosters a transparent and growth-oriented environment. The platform also promotes 360-degree, multi stakeholder feedback (MSF) based on performance and potential, removing internal bias and ensuring holistic performance insights. 

Key features

• It supports flexible and customizable frameworks, like MBOs, OKRs, PP, and BSC, as well as bell curve normalization frameworks. 
• Helps maintain a repository of goals, competencies, and skills at a departmental and organizational level role that helps employees better align their goals with their company. 
• Provides advanced analytics and actionable insights into how your employees are doing, what drives their performance, and what areas can be fixed to offer a better employee experience. 
• Ensures seamless integration with other HR modules, like payroll, compensation management, and recruitment. 
• Provides API support to connect with third-party tools. 
• Provides a mobile-friendly interface to provide feedback and reviews on the go. 
• Makes performance management agile with the application of AI in logical steps. Examples include continuous feedback summarization that summarizes all the feedback an employee receives, allowing you to understand their strengths and AOIs. Another example is the review assistant, which only requires you to describe what you want to say, and it helps write the feedback. 

Compatibility: Compatible with all major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS. 

Integrations: Integrates with major payroll platforms like ADP and collaboration tools like Slack, Teams, and email platforms. It also integrates with top LMS platforms and offers custom API integrations. 

Best suited for: Industries of all types and sizes as it’s equipped to handle unique performance management needs while being scalable, customizable, and cost-effective. 

2. Workday

Workday offers a Human Capital Management (HCM) solution to empower your employees and high-performers to work better. Its talent optimization solution helps meet your talent goal and build a skilled workforce. 

For instance, it provides the complete picture of skills and talent data within your organization that categorizes an individual employee’s existing skills and suggested skills—empowering employees to build diverse skills and have healthy competition with their colleagues. This practice helps foster continuous improvement. 

Key features: 

• Provides holistic employee-level insights to track employee progress and identify opportunities to drive more skills and mobility. 
• Offers managers with tools for continuous feedback and regular check-ins to discuss progress and roadblocks. 
• Provides data-driven adaptive insights into employee planning and performance improvement. 

Compatibility: Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android

Integrations: It integrates with tools like Slack, Google Workspace, and Teams, as well as LMS platforms and third-party tools. It also offers Workday Extend, a development platform for custom integrations and apps. 

Best suited for: Medium-sized to large businesses with complex and global workforce management needs. 

3. Oracle

Oracle’s performance or goal management solution is part of its Human Capital Management (HCM) suite. It facilitates managing and tracking individual goals closely to align with the overall organizational goals and talent management processes. 

It streamlines goal setting and allows employees to track goals on an ongoing basis. Similar to Darwinbox, you can also cascade goals across departments and teams to ensure alignment with organizational goals. 

However, since Oracle’s interface puts much more emphasis on functionality, it’s leaning towards a more complex layout with a range of features. 

Key features: 

• Lets you access and track goals on your smartphone, tablet, or desktop with a consistent look and feel. 
• Goal management makes it easier for managers to view and gain insights into employees' progress in their goals. It also provides flexibility to add new goals or shift goals amongst team members. 
• Goal sharing makes it easier for employees to share common goals—allowing them to work towards a common purpose. This collaboration also boosts productivity, enabling employees to exchange ideas and information, documents and links, and receive in-context feedback. 
• Enables seamless integration with other Oracle HCM modules, like recruitment, workforce planning, and learning. 
• Supports career development by linking an individual’s performance outcomes with learning opportunities using Oracle Learning.  

Compatibility: Fully cloud-hosted and supports major platforms and OS like Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and macOS. 

Integrations: Integrates with Oracle Cloud applications, collaboration tools, like Teams and Slack, external HR tools, analytics tools, and LMS platforms, and offers custom API support. 

Best suited for: Large enterprises

4. SAP SF

SAP SuccessFactors (SAP SF) is an integral part of the cloud-based, AI-enabled Human capital management (HCM) suite, which is designed to provide robust performance and goal management capabilities. 

It has a modular user interface that streamlines navigation and logically groups features like goal setting, performance reviews, and continuous feedback for easy access. 

Key features: 

• Allows managers and employees to collaboratively set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals. 
• Enables structured check-ins for managers to discuss progress, issues, and growth opportunities and facilitates real-time feedback between managers and employees. 
• Provides customizable templates for different types of reviews, such as annual, probationary, and project-based reviews. 
• Provides AI-enabled HR self-service and learning services to help employees work smarter and faster and grow their skills. 
• Access to deeper insights to make data-driven decisions and intuitive reports and dashboards to identify the top talent and performance trends. 

Compatibility: Fully cloud-hosted and supports major platforms and OS like Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and macOS. 

Integrations: Natively integrates with SAP modules and third-party HR tools, like ADP and BambooHR. Also integrates with LMS platforms and collaboration platforms, like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and email providers. 

Best suited for: Medium-sized and large enterprises. 

Point Performance Management Solutions

5. Lattice 

Lattice focuses on fostering a growth-oriented workplace while simplifying goal setting, performance reviews, and employee feedback. 

Similar to Darwinbox, Lattice supports both performance and talent reviews to enhance overall team performance. Whether you wish to run quarterly, annual, or project-based reviews, Lattice adapts to your organization’s specific needs. 

Key features: 

• 1:1 meetings boost communication and relationships between managers and employees, making it easier for managers to customize the cadence, collaborate on meeting agendas, and track and resolve action items. 
• Promotes continuous and cross-functional feedback all year round and also allows you to celebrate the top and outstanding performance through ‘Praise.’
• Collects feedback on employee satisfaction, engagement, and morale through engagement tools and pulse engagement surveys. 

Compatibility: Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and macOS. 

Integrations: Integrates with Slack, Single Sign On, HRIS, Microsoft Teams, and other integrations like Jira and your email provider. 

Best suited for: Small and medium-sized businesses

6. Leapsome

Leapsome is a comprehensive employee engagement, learning, and performance management system. It aims to streamline people management and elevate individual performance through its modern features. 

Key features: 

• Enables you to run 36-degree feedback and performance reviews, which are easy to set up and complete. 
• Provides customization abilities to make goals visible to individuals, teams, or the whole company. 
• Goal trees make it easier to connect individuals, teams, and company objectives—highlighting the dependencies and ownership of specific tasks. 
• Enables employees to give and receive continuous, real-time, and personalized feedback with pulse engagement surveys, along with sharing praise for individual contributions and efforts. 
• Provides tools to structure one-on-one meetings and discussions with pre-built customizable templates. 
• The tool allows employees to create and track career development goals with managers. At the same time, it allows managers to personalize employees' learning experiences by delivering them the right content at the right time. 
• Provides advanced analytics and actionable insights into performance trends, engagement, and skill gaps for better and informed decision-making. 

Compatibility: Fully cloud-hosted and supports major platforms and OS like Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and macOS. 

Integrations: Integrates with Slack, Outlook, Jira, Microsoft Teams, and more. 

Best suited for: Small to medium-sized businesses

7. 15Five 

15Five provides a easy-to-use performance management process that allows you to tailor your organizational performance management needs. 

It has a simple setup review cycle, which you can set up fast. Besides, it also offers customization abilities, allowing you to customize visibility, choose a suitable type of review cycle and template, and choose collaborators and managers who would be contributing to the review process. 

You can also automate your performance review by repeating the same review cycles quarterly or bi-annually. 

Key features: 

• It prioritizes weekly check-ins and updates on individual goals, challenges, and achievements for ongoing communication. 
• Allows managers and employees to set goals and OKRs collaboratively. 
• Provides a holistic view of employee performance by combining qualitative and quantitative data. 
• The ‘High Fives’ feature enables peers and managers to share constructive employee feedback, suggestions, praises, and inputs. 
• Unlike many other tools, 15Five also provides management development tools, like training and resources, allowing managers to improve coaching capabilities and enhance leadership skills. 

Compatibility: Fully cloud-hosted and supports major platforms and OS like Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and macOS. 

Integrations: Integrates with major HRIS and productivity tools, like Slack, Jira, Asana, Trello, and Teams. 

Best suited for: Small to medium-sized businesses

Conclusion 

Organizations adopting continuous performance feedback solutions outperformed their competitors at a 24% higher rate and are also 39% better at attracting the best talent and 44% better at retaining them. 

This suggests the growing importance of continuous feedback and reviews for employees to ensure an organization’s continuous growth and development. 

Hence, it is important to choose the right performance management tool that ensures continuous performance management feedback as well as streamlines goal setting and communication and promotes employees’ professional growth. 

However, if you’re looking for a holistic, all-in-one solution that not only facilitates performance management but also streamlines other core HR operations, such as leave management, workforce management, and payroll, Darwinbox is the right choice. 

With an AI-powered goal generator, automated performance reviews, and 360-degree multi-stakeholder feedback, Darwinbox offers customizable workflows that make performance management easy for companies of all sizes. 

Request a quote or schedule a demo today to learn more. 

FAQs

What features should you look for in performance management software?

Look for features like goal-setting frameworks, performance tracking, continuous feedback, automated reviews, advanced analytics and reporting, scalability, third-party integrations, and a user-friendly interface.

What are some common problems with a legacy performance management platform?

A legacy or traditional performance management process often lacks flexibility and disappoints and dissatisfies employees due to its delayed, one-size-fits-all feedback approach. Moreover, they fail to provide actionable and data-driven insights and detailed analytics on employee growth and performance.

How does performance management software improve employee engagement?

Clear goal setting, continuous feedback, and transparent reviews boost a growth-oriented environment, boosting employee motivation, collaboration, and engagement.

What is 360-degree feedback, and how does it benefit organizations?

360-degree feedback in a performance management process gathers deeper insights and inputs from multiple stakeholders, ensuring unbiased, comprehensive, and well-rounded performance evaluations.

Can small businesses benefit from performance management software?

Yes, scalable and cost-effective solutions like Darwinbox can help businesses streamline performance management, boost productivity and increase employee engagement. Besides offering use cases for large enterprises, Darwinbox also offers flexibility to support small businesses.