A guide for HR leaders: how to build a strong business case for performance and feedback technology
December 4, 2024
December 4, 2024
As a HR leader, you already understand the transformative potential of performance and feedback technology to positively impact your firm. You know that a streamlined process will reduce the time and admin burden felt across the business, and that the right tools will enable more regular feedback, boost employee engagement, and help stretched managers to do a better job with their limited time.
However, convincing other key stakeholders – such as firm leaders or the Chief Financial Officer – often requires proactively addressing their concerns.
Here are a few general tips on how to build a strong business case for performance and feedback technology, including how to address some common leadership concerns.
It’s crucial to communicate the high-level benefits that performance management technology offers in terms of efficiency, engagement, retention and collaboration1. For example, the benefits of Performance Leader’s solution are summarised in Figure 1.
Manual forms and paper-based performance reviews are often cumbersome and time-consuming. Performance management technology is a game-changer because it gets rid of the need for them. Put simply, the efficiency gains alone make the technology’s ROI a slam-dunk.
By automating tasks, such as distributing forms, gathering feedback, collating inputs, summarising reviews and tracking, the technology saves well over an hour of time per user. These time savings quickly add up across the firm.
There is also a significant multiplier effect on the time and admin saved for partners and senior managers, who typically have to deal with multiple direct reports and reviews.
Considering that the annual cost ‘per user per year’ of a performance management platform is typically less than the average ‘price per hour of billable time’, the investment is easily justified based on time savings alone.
This compelling business case is enhanced further by the technology’s other features, including integrated financial performance data (from existing systems), AI-generated summaries, and a streamlined user experience thanks to a process that’s smooth, timely and consistent.
Much has been written about the potential of AI tools and they are already positively impacting the review experience for busy people leaders with specific use cases. Partners at one of our UK law firm clients estimate they have saved an additional 20-25 mins per direct report thanks to AI-generated feedback summaries, which the partners then edit, finalise and share.
Of course, saving time for your people is not just about the cost of that time. It’s also about how the saved time can be better invested, including by preparing for performance conversations, agreeing priorities, understanding performance insights, and making decisions.
For your HR team, performance management technology can deliver total ‘pain relief’. HR teams are often burdened by weeks of administration caused by poor compliance, the need to chase forms, and time-consuming reporting. Performance management technology can significantly free their time so they can better spend it supporting managers.
One of the key drivers of an engaged, high-performing workforce is regular, meaningful feedback2. Performance management software is built to enable ongoing feedback and career development conversations, which, in turn, help partners and employees align their efforts with the firm’s objectives.
This is a stand-out benefit that can be captured by having a tool that makes it quick, simple and easy for your people to give and request feedback. By fostering better communication, alignment, more feedback and recognition, our platform ensures managers are tuned into their people’s priorities, development and career aspirations. This creates a culture where employees feel more connected to their work, and leaders can quickly address any issues affecting morale or productivity.
A transparent and structured approach to performance management also supports recognition and reward of employee contribution, which are key drivers of loyalty and commitment. While the true price to pay for employee churn is widely debated, Gallup suggests the cost of replacing an employee can range from one-half to two times their annual salary3. Well-implemented performance management technology can actively reduce these costs by keeping high-performing talent engaged and loyal to the firm. By enhancing retention and reducing turnover in this way, the technology can help the firm avoid significant costs associated with recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity.
In our experience, collaboration is a core principle and strategic priority for every contemporary professional services firm. Performance management technology can play a vital role in fostering shared purpose and creating a more meaningful connection with the firm’s strategy.
By enabling individuals to align their goals to the firm’s strategic priorities, and share them with colleagues within group/sector business plans, our platform creates cross-functional cooperation to deliver on key business and client challenges.
With thoughtful application, it’s possible to ‘operationalise’ collaboration by making it easy to see what others are working on (via a keyword search) and connect individual efforts with group/sector/client priorities.
Importantly, the technology also supports leaders’ ability to track, recognise and celebrate collaboration success stories in real-time with their teams, which further reinforces a collaborative culture.
Even with a solid business case, firm leaders may still resist adopting performance management technology. This resistance can often stem from their concerns about upfront costs, the time required, stakeholder input or the potential disruption of established processes.
To help overcome any resistance to change an established (albeit inefficient) process, you may want to consider implementing the new solution in phases.
By using a phased implementation approach, you can help build trust, confidence and momentum. As users experience the benefits of the platform, their engagement with the system naturally increases. This paves the way for more progressive solutions.
A proven approach is to start by solving the most immediate pain points, such as streamlining the formal review and feedback process (no one is going to complain about making things simpler!), before rolling out other features that address less pressing or more nuanced challenges.
Another great ‘starting simple’ approach is to launch the platform with ‘Partners as managers’ and hold back the partner formal review. This approach lets partners experience an immediate improvement in the way they manage the performance and feedback process for their multiple direct reports. Our experience shows partners will often clamour to follow suit!
The professional services sector is littered with stories of technology white-elephants and mammoth implementations. That’s often why some stakeholders are sceptical about technology change and its potential disruption to the business.
Two key questions that often need to be addressed to stop sign-off inertia killing your ambition for change are:
Will it (really) work for us?
The answer to this question depends on the platform’s flexibility – in our experience one size does not fit all, and it’s critical that the software can flex to follow your firm's culture and process, not the other way round. It’s also important to use a consulting-led approach to the design process, which draws out key issues, opportunities and risks that will guide how you introduce, support and land the software with your people.
At Performance Leader we do this using three short, highly effective meetings:
1. A Success Workshop to understand the firm culture, current approach, priorities, stakeholder needs, potential risks and plans to mitigate them.
2. A Design Workshop to map the performance and feedback process to the software – in this session, we anchor the design decisions to the success factors and use simplicity as our guiding principle.
3. A Gateway Review within the design process to gather feedback, refine design and engage key stakeholders as product champions.
How long will it (really) take?
By ‘starting simple and building momentum’, you can capture many quick wins.
Typical design and implementation timeframes range from 6-12 weeks, which is far less than an HRIS or CRM project, where months often turn into years. This is made possible by the dynamic approach to performance and feedback, which avoids the pressure of a "big bang" launch in which users are required to do everything at once.
Clear communication is crucial when introducing new technology. HR should work closely with firm leadership to ensure that the benefits – both strategic and financial – are well understood and communicated with key stakeholders (see Figure 2).
You can share success stories from other firms, demonstrate early wins, and provide data on efficiency savings and ROI to help solidify support for the initiative.
By presenting a balanced, well-evidenced business case that addresses any key concerns, you can help secure the investment – and importantly the buy-in – needed to implement performance management technology and position your firm for sustained high performance.
1 This article is partly based on “Utilizing technology for partner performance management” (Ray D’Cruz, Chapter 19) Managing partner performance: Strategies for transforming underperforming partners (Jonathan Middleburgh and Nick Jarret-Kerr).
2 “How Effective Feedback Fuels Performance”, Gallup, 2024 (Denise McLain and Bailey Nelson)
3 “42% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored”, Gallup, 2024 (Corey Tatel and Ben Wigert)
Book a discovery meeting with us to explore your firm’s approach to building a sustainable high performance culture.
