Top 7 Performance Management Systems in the UAE

How driven and engaged a company’s employees are dictates its success. In fact, organizations with highly engaged employees experience 21% higher profitability than those with disengaged employees. 

Companies need reliable systems and tools to streamline goal setting, communication and collaboration, and feedback—strategies that foster employee engagement and promote employee performance. 

This is where a performance management system comes into play. 

Performance management helps companies navigate unique opportunities and challenges in dynamic work environments, especially in the Middle East, such as the UAE, where rapid business growth with diverse workforces is common. And performance management software can facilitate this process for businesses. 

In this article, we’ll dive deep into understanding performance management software and its importance, as well as the top performance management software you can choose from for your UAE business. 

Benefits of Performance Management Software: Why Your Business Needs It? 

Performance management software is a tool that helps businesses manage and track the progress of a large and dynamic workforce. 

It helps companies to assess, track, evaluate, and improve employee performance by making processes like setting goals, providing continuous performance management feedback, and conducting appraisals easier and more efficient. 

Thus, a performance management system streamlines the entire performance management process and provides a centralized platform with detailed insights into every employee’s performance and engagement metrics and how they align with business objectives. 

Here are several ways how a UAE-based business and company can benefit from performance management software: 

• Companies can make informed, data-driven decisions based on the powerful insights a performance management system offers into employees' strengths, weaknesses, progress, and productivity. 
• Continuous feedback and a clear idea of organizational goals help employees stay focused—improving their productivity and efficiency. 
• Reduces manual effort and ensures high accuracy by automating performance management operations. 
• Eliminates bias and ensures fair appraisals with data-driven and structured performance evaluations. 
• Increases retention rates by offering career support to employees, addressing their skills gap, honing existing skills, and recommending training resources. 

If these benefits are convincing enough to make you opt for performance management software, here are the top options.

Consolidated solutions

• Darwinbox for flexible, compliant, customizable, and all-in-one performance management solutions with AI-powered capabilities. 
• BambooHR for automated performance tracking and customizable review cycles. 

Point solutions

• Lattice for employee engagement and feedback-driven features.
• Leapsome for a reliable learning platform with 360-degree reviews and personalized development experience.  

Local solutions

• Bayzat for compliance-friendly performance management system with a mobile-first approach. 
• ZenHR for UAE-based SMBs with automated performance assessments and competency evaluation features. 
• gulfHR for localized performance management with multilingual support, compliance-focused features, and goal alignment. 

Let’s take a detailed look into each of these software to understand their features and offerings. 

Consolidated Performance Management Solutions

1. Darwinbox

   Darwinbox provides a robust and personalized performance management solution tailored for businesses worldwide. It focuses on goal setting, agile, continuous performance reviews and feedback, and talent development. 

   Darwinbox understands that every organization and its team has unique needs and requirements—thus offering multiple flexible goal frameworks, including OKR, MBO, PP, and BSC. This allows companies to choose one or combine multiple frameworks to tailor and match their performance management needs. 

   When it comes to goal setting, Darwinbox supports all types of goals, including BU, team, company-wide, and individual goals, along with project and dynamic team goals—making it easier for companies to leverage tailored goal setting. 

   Besides, with a centralized goal repository that maintains and includes the employee goals, goal type, department, competencies, skills at role, and custom measurement scales—employees are better aligned and clear with what and when they should be working on their strategic goals. 

   In addition, it offers the most flexible review construct, allowing you to perform both performance and talent reviews. You can also set up a review structure based on custom parameters, such as skills, goals, competencies, and N-grid. 

   Key features: 

   • It provides necessary tools, like performance journals, to record and keep track of conversations and critical incidents and nudge employees at critical times, making performance reviews a regular everyday process rather than a one-time event. The journals or notes also help remove recency bias. 
   • It supports continuous, multi-stakeholder 360-degree feedback, enabling anyone in the organization (internal and external stakeholders) to give and receive feedback in real time. This promotes continuous improvement and removes internal bias. 
   • It provides tools like Goals Explorer, an AI-powered goal generator, and goal cascading that makes communicating goals easier from organizational to individual goals, increasing the line of sight and goal tracking. 
   • Ensures agility with the application of AI at each step. Examples include review assistant, which assists you in writing comprehensive and logical feedback and continuous feedback summarization, which summarizes an employee’s feedback and helps you understand their strengths and AOIs. 
   • Provides advanced analytics and downloadable insights that help identify what drives your talent performance and potential hotspots that require fixes. 
   • It comes with a flexible setup, API support, and seamless integration with HR modules like payroll and compensation management. 

   Best-suited for: Organizations of all types and sizes with unique, scalable, and customizable PMS needs. 

2. BambooHR

   BambooHR provides performance management software that focuses on offering customizable solutions for different business needs without providing a one-size-fits-all solution. 

   It comes with a 360-degree feedback feature, which involves manager-to-employee, peer feedback, self-assessments, and skip levels—involving diverse stakeholders for an employee’s timely feedback. 

   BambooHR’s performance management module generates performance reports that provide a simple and visual inside scoop into each individual employee’s performance and progress. The report makes it easier for managers to identify high-performing and underperforming employees and ways to improve them. 

   While it provides performance insights, BambooHR lacks advanced reporting features and dedicated analytics tools compared to its competitors. 

   Key features: 

   • It provides self and manager assessments and one-on-one check-in templates to ensure ongoing reviews and frequent communication. 
   • It comes with customizable review cycles along with 30, 60 and 90-day check-ins for new hires. 
   • The Goal Status report makes it easier for employers to create, share, monitor, and review goals on the desktop or mobile app. However, it lacks sophisticated and customizable goal-setting methodologies, such as OKRs, MBOs, and in-depth analytics. 
   • It provides automated reminders and notifications for employees and managers to keep them informed about new comments and goal progress and completion. 

   Best-suited for: Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), but not ideal for large enterprises with advanced, scalable, and complex performance management needs. 

3. Point Performance Management Solutions

   Lattice 

   Lattice is a dedicated performance management software that offers AI-powered solutions to help companies and teams manage employee information, run performance reviews, and align company priorities. 

   It helps you set measurable goals and track progress, using OKRs and Goals to help you set and track strategic goals and keep employees aligned with them. It also integrates with third-party applications, such as Jira, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, to make your goals more actionable. 

   It helps ensure regular communication between managers and employees, with 1:1 meetings that help managers view an employee’s direct report, allowing them to collaborate on areas of improvement and resolve action items. This helps build stronger manager-employee relationships and boost retention rates. 

   Key features: 

   • It lets you ask weekly, customizable update questions to the employees to understand their sentiments, temperature, and progress to stay up-to-date with the team. 
   • It aligns performance management with the compensation cycle to ensure employees are paid fairly for their contributions. 
   • It provides ready workflows, templates, and dashboards to launch your performance management process and customize the review cycle with annual, quarterly, or automated reviews or project-based reviews. 
   • Its engagement surveys provides real-time data about employee sentiments and feedback with Lattice AI with actionable insights and suggested actions. However, the predefined structure of these surveys and other features may not fit every company’s needs. 
   • While it offers a user-friendly interface and an intuitive design, some advanced features may come with a learning curve, and the pricing can be high for small businesses. 

   Best-suited for: Medium to large enterprises. 

4. Leapsome 

   Leapsome is specifically built for performance management, which helps companies enhance employee growth and success. 

   It helps you deliver 360-degree reviews, goal-setting, and continuous feedback with personalized development plans that help boost employee engagement. Besides, it also helps managers with regular meetings, on-demand leadership courses, and an AI copilot. 

   Key features: 

   • Helps you set up flexible goal processes with recurring goal cycles and fixed timelines. You can also use the OKR framework and customize the visibility of whether you want to share the strategic goals with specific teams, individual colleagues, or the whole company. 
   • It sends automated progress updates and tracking reminders and makes leaving feedback and comments easier to ensure collaboration. 
   • Its Goal Trees feature combines team, individual, and company goals to highlight goal dependencies and ownership and ensure transparency to avoid conflicts. 
   • Managers get quick access to past feedback, peer reviews, 1:1 meeting notes, and goal performance to write fair, contextualized, and unbiased reviews. 
   • It also comes with easy-to-build surveys with default question templates or custom questions to gain meaningful feedback and track engagement levels. However, while it provides these insights, Leapsome doesn’t handle or align compensation planning with performance management. 

   Best-suited for: Medium to large-sized businesses. 

5. Local Performance Management Solutions

   Bayzat

   Bayzat is a local, UAE-based HR platform that offers a performance management module that helps you ensure compliance with local labor laws. 

   It focuses on 360-degree feedback and helps set up frequent conversations with employees to facilitate one-on-one conversations and more efficient feedback. 

   Besides, it allows managers to score each employee’s goals and track their company-wide progress, making it easier for employers to manage, track, and improve performance and for employees to reach their goals. 

   Key features: 

   • It allows managers and employees to set up individual goals that align with the company’s strategic objectives. 
   • It provides a customized evaluation form that helps assess employee skills, gain valuable insights, and send manual or automated reminders. However, compared to other tools, it lacks deep analytics and advanced OKR tracking. 
   • Bayzat's mobile app helps employees check in with their goals; however, it lacks complex performance structures and Learning Management System (LMS) features. 

   Best-suited for: Small to Medium-sized businesses (SMBs) 

6. ZenHR

   ZenHR provides a performance and evaluation module that helps automate time-consuming processes and keep your employees aligned with your organizational goals. 

   It provides the OKRs framework, allowing employees to create, collaborate, and manage their goals with managers—creating a constant feedback loop for optimum performance. 

   Key features: 

   • Ir provides a Competencies Evaluation feature that helps identify each employee’s required skills and behaviors for the job role. 
   • The General Factors feature helps track factors such as employee attendance, adherence to company policies, interpersonal relationships, work discipline, etc., which may affect their appraisals. 
   • While it encourages continuous performance management feedback, it lacks deep analytics and advanced AI-driven insights to make better-informed performance decisions. 
   • It comes with an intuitive user interface but offers limited customization and flexibility for large enterprises with unique requirements. 

   Best-suited for: UAE-based SMBs with basic performance management needs. 

7. gulfHR

   gulfHR offers HR, payroll, and performance management solutions tailored for UAE-based companies and businesses. 

   To use its performance management module and set up performance management campaigns, you must add your company values, corporate objectives, and talent profile or behavioral and technical competencies. 

   Key features: 

   • To offer a digital and automated performance management process, it works well with its Employee Self-Service portal. 
   • It lets you link organizational goals to individual or departmental objectives. 
   • While it offers multilingual support and helps meet UAE-based compliance needs, GulfHR lacks advanced goal-setting features, such as OKRs, advanced analytics and deeper insights, and learning and development features. 

Conclusion 

A robust performance management system that adopts and promotes continuous feedback and multi-stakeholder performance reviews not only helps in organizational success but also assists employee development, growth, and engagement. 

While you can choose from the tools mentioned above, which come with their own strengths and weaknesses, Darwinbox provides an all-in-one HR, payroll, and performance management solution that makes performance management more streamlined, efficient, and accurate. 

With customizable workflows and flexible goal-setting features, Darwinbox’s performance management system caters to companies and businesses of all sizes and types. 

Want to try out a custom performance management solution that caters to your business’s unique needs? Schedule a demo to get hands-on experience.

FAQs

How do UAE labor laws impact the performance management software I choose?

UAE-based companies need to choose performance management software that aligns with and ensures compliance with UAE labor laws and regulations, such as multilingual support, DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion) standards compliance, fair and transparent appraisals, and notice period rules.

What features should I look for when choosing a performance management system?

Check for features like goal-setting features and frameworks, performance review cycles and customization, continuous feedback, learning and development integration, data analytics and deeper insights, security and compliance, internal and third-party integrations, mobile accessibility, and user experience.

How does performance management help in employee retention?

86% of employees and professionals state that they would switch jobs for more professional development opportunities. Performance management software helps employers identify employees' strengths and skill gaps through continuous performance evaluation and regular feedback, further boosting their careers. This helps increase employee engagement and satisfaction, thereby improving employee retention and reducing turnover.