Problems with federal performance management of employees, including cumbersome and resource-draining paper performance plans, leadership problems and employee morale, engagement and retention challenges, have been well documented. Many of these problems stem from a dearth of innovation in the performance management space that has made evolution to an automated, paperless world virtually unattainable from a cost, time and implementation perspective.

Fortunately, a new world order has arrived that is changing the way federal agencies think about performance management. There is a way out of the stranglehold of pen-to-paper performance plans that permeate government. Furthermore, agencies are no longer confined to expensive, rigid and time-consuming legacy systems to instill agency-wide performance management change, including the improvement of individual employee performance.

Acendre’s ePerform is a modern, innovative, secure, cloud-based system that is turning federal performance management on its head.

The benefits of this new technology are demonstrable and persuasive:

• Fast implementation
• Incremental change for broader acceptance
• Configurable and adaptable to agency processes
• Insightful analytics
• Cost-effective and minimal resources.

This technology is helping federal agencies fast-track their journey to improved performance management through a readily achievable blueprint for success.

Automation – The First Step

With minimal change and minimal time and effort, Acendre is helping agencies quickly move away from their paper performance plans. This is accomplished with ePerform’s minimal setup time and helps employees and managers alike embrace the improvements with bottom-up participation.

Through a collaborative approach between Acendre’s Client Experience team and an agency’s HR leaders, HR Specialists and supervisors, an agency can embrace a narrow project scope that allows for quick wins and broad acceptance. Within a short period of time, agencies are able to move away from their manual, paper performance plans for General Schedule employees and for their Senior Executive Service (SES) performance management programs and systems.

This move away from paper for both SES and non-SES employees can help agencies save astronomical amounts of wasted time. With hundreds or thousands of hours wasted annually by manually managing paper processes, the payback is real, quantifiable and rapid. ePerform automates the process of entry and appraisal of an employee’s critical elements, leveraging critical element libraries to easily support the setting and acceptance of critical elements between supervisors and employees.

Furthermore, there are additional benefits, with tools to help employee engagement and interaction between employees and supervisors. This is accomplished by providing employees and supervisors with the ability to share information about successes and potential areas for development in ePerform’s appraisal period performance journals at any time. No more waiting for pre-defined times to interact. And this correlates directly with the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) 2014 directive on engagement and leadership as well as the aforementioned problems unearthed through the annual federal employee viewpoint survey results.

Integrated Workflows – The Right Information to the Right People at the Right Time

ePerform provides integrated workflow through a rules engine that automates an agency’s performance appraisal cycle. It ensures employees and managers move through the workflow with any required tasks. All relevant data moves through the process automatically, to the appropriate stakeholder, and the workflow can be configured according to an agency’s unique needs. This also supports the establishment of an agency’s review panel, capturing outcomes and supporting the formal and informal reconsideration processes. Changes such as the recently unveiled new SES guidelines, which help agencies better review their senior executives, can easily be accommodated – quickly and inexpensively.

Dashboards and Reporting – Insight for Data-based Decisions

ePerform provides a Performance Appraisal Plan dashboard for easy reference to the status of the performance review cycle. This includes reporting dashboards for employees, supervisors, executives and HR Specialists that provide real-time insight into the status of the Performance Appraisal Cycle, helping improve completion rates and drive better outcomes for agencies. With usable analytics available to the people that need to know, agencies are in a better position to elevate the entire performance management discipline.

Government Performance Appraisal Plan – Beyond a Manual Plan

ePerform supports Government Performance Appraisal Plan form template formats for easy viewing, sharing and distribution. Presently, the government still requires performance appraisal plans to follow a prescribed form output. ePerform supports different form templates and delivers varying form template outputs to remove the onerous manual aspect of the hard copy performance appraisal plan.

Federal Performance Management for the 21^st Century

It is past time for federal agencies to move from paper performance plans to online automated systems. Fortunately, a solution exists today to address this problem. And unlike the past expensive, inflexible and resource-intensive legacy systems that have typically defined federal talent management solutions, ePerform provides secure and fast implementation, along with flexibility to meet ever-changing federal agency demands and regulations.

Required security considerations are built into the system. With the application designed and implemented to meet FISMA and FedRAMP requirements, security can be addressed without extra work required by the agency. And with cloud-based ePerform delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, regular, ongoing improvements ensure agencies performance management needs are always addressed without additional investment.

Federal talent management continues to evolve to meet the challenges and demands of the 21^st century. For performance management, long mired in a mountain of paper and frustration from manual systems, the way forward is surprisingly fast and cost-efficient, and the future is bright.