Product Update: Introducing PerformYard Engagement

PerformYard is launching a new product.

Introducing…PerformYard Engagement

This is an anonymous employee engagement toolkit that we created specifically to enhance PerformYard Performance.

The new product features anonymous engagement surveys with scientifically validated questions, dashboards, and extensive cohort filtering. PerformYard Engagement helps your team:

Keep Your Finger on the Pulse: Monitor employee engagement over time to see the impact of your initiatives, at the organization level, team level or in cohorts like new hires.

Understand Employee Needs: Dig into the factors that are driving or tanking your levels of engagement. Slice and dice the data by time period, dynamic employee cohorts, and factors. 

‍Take Action: PerformYard’s approach to engagement focuses on factors clearly under your control. Share feedback with a specific manager or tweak your check-in forms. 

Why We Built PerformYard Engagement

Why does a performance management company build an engagement survey product? There is a special magic that happens when you tightly integrate engagement surveys with performance management processes.  

We’ve worked with thousands of HR professionals and company leaders to build their vision of modern performance management.

Over time we realized that our best customers treat this as a journey, not a one-off project. They regularly iterate and tweak until they have formalized a set of processes into a high-performance culture.

Most interesting, is the feedback loop these organizations use to direct their continuous improvement. They run engagement surveys! The surveys measure their progress and inspire their next steps.

It’s become clear to us that engagement surveys are not a separate HR activity, but a vital part of continuously improving performance and developing a high-performance culture.

Bringing Engagement and Performance Management Together

Engagement surveys and performance management go hand in hand. They are two key processes that help companies build a high-performance culture. That’s why we’re bringing Engagement to our existing Performance product.

Modern performance management strategies seek to drive performance through a highly engaged workforce, and engagement surveys are the best way to monitor and ultimately improve your performance processes. 

Here are a few of the benefits of this two-pronged approach that we’re already seeing:

View your engagement data in the context of performance:

Not all engagement data is created equal. When you’re building a high-performance culture you want to see engagement data in the context of performance. “What’s holding back your highest performers?” is a much more interesting question than “What do our lowest performers love about the organization?” If you don’t put engagement and performance data in one place you miss these important nuances.

Use the same segmentation for engagement and performance:

In PerformYard, the employee groupings you use for performance are automatically available to segment engagement data. This means you can understand engagement by the realities of how your people work, not some standard set of groupings. This is key to making engagement data actionable. When the data is tied back to your processes and your structures you can quickly take the tactical actions necessary to further develop your culture.

Measure engagement’s impact on performance:

Driving engagement drives outcomes. And when you integrate performance and engagement this isn’t just a theory, you have the data. Over time you can build a deeper understanding of what factors of engagement matter most and how changes to your processes impact engagement and ultimately performance.

Engagement Product Tour

We believe engagement surveys should be tightly integrated with your performance management processes, so if you choose to add PerformYard Engagement it will appear in the navigation of your PerformYard account as a Heart and Pulse icon.

‍The PerformYard Engagement Survey

PerformYard invested in the creation of a state-of-the-art survey to measure engagement and the factors that drive it. The survey focuses on factors that are both under an organization’s control and most closely correlated with employee performance.

We brought together the leading science on human engagement and PerformYard’s experience partnering with thousands of organizations to drive performance. You get the perfect combination of scientifically valid and practically useful data to inform your performance processes.

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‍Engagement Dashboards

We brought our dashboard approach to engagement with dynamic visualizations. Anyone can use our built-in analysis tools to see trends, uncover correlations, dig up root causes, and segment data. 

Multiple levels of dashboards help you start at the highest level and progressively dig deeper into your data to find the quick wins that increase performance. Quickly jump from company-level engagement to how a single team feels about their manager.

‍Dynamic Cohorting

Effective engagement surveys enable you to drill down into the details to uncover how engagement and engagement factors differ across groups of employees. 

PerformYard brings your existing groups over from the performance management product so you can visualize engagement in the context of your performance processes. We also enable dynamic cohorts that are based on the employee data in PerformYard. 

That means you can do things like create cohorts for employees in their first year at your organization and the list will be updated based on the start dates listed in PerformYard. You can also do things like create cohorts for different managers and those will be updated even as people move around within your organization.

Cohort Analysis

With dynamic cohorts and our cohort analysis, you can find the small tactical opportunities that will drive engagement and performance. Surveys don’t have to be about systemic issues, we designed PerformYard Engagement to help you monitor the details across your organization and make the small changes that compound into a high-performance culture. Examples might include asking a manager to add more goal discussion to their one-on-ones or adding a question to your check-in forms.

eNPS

eNPS is a standardized measure which means you can compare your scores to benchmarks. You can track eNPS over time, between cohorts, and the correlation to factors.

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Our Perspective on Engagement

PerformYard has been partnering with our customers to build modern performance management systems for almost a decade now. We get excited about helping people and teams perform at their best. 

That’s also the perspective we brought to our engagement survey product.

When employees have a high level of engagement they’re passionate, motivated, positive, resilient, they have an ownership mentality and they’re personally aligned with their work.

These are all the things our customers are trying to accomplish with their performance management strategies and better communication with their people.

We’ve designed our engagement surveys to focus on engagement factors that best correlate with improved performance. Rather than doing a general survey for employee feedback, PerformYard measures an employee’s state of engagement and the factors contributing to that state.

The surveys are designed to help our customers close the loop on their performance processes and move towards their vision of a high-performance culture.

Our engagement survey is built to be used in conjunction with our performance management platform to uncover opportunities and act on those opportunities. The action could mean something as simple as a small tweak to a form or some quick coaching for a manager. 

PerformYard does offer ways to collect general feedback, but our curated engagement survey is about creating a virtuous cycle with your performance process.