Rob Wheatley

Cogendo Achieve ISO 27001 Certification

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Today we’re proud to announce that Cogendo has been certified for compliance with the ISO 27001 information security standard.

What is ISO 27001?

ISO 27001 is the international standard for information security management. It specifies a set of best practices and controls for information management.

 

This means that as an organisation we have:

  • Examined our information security risks.
  • Designed a set of security controls to mitigate these risks.
  • Put in place a documented Information Security Management System (ISMS) that not only ensures that we’re doing the right things today, but that we’ll continue to do them, and monitor our performance.
  • Conducted an internal audit of the above to test for conformity.
  • Undertaken two audits conducted by an ISO-accredited independent certification body to test for conformity.

 

But it doesn’t end there! Although our certificate is valid for three years, we will have annual surveillance audits, where the certification body ensures that we are maintaining our good practices, and have processes in place to ensure that we’re continually improving our ISMS. After three years we’ll go through another full audit, to earn a certificate for another three years.

 

How Does This Affect Cogendo?

We have always taken data security and privacy very seriously at Cogendo, so formalising our existing practices was the natural thing to do. Now Cogendo has formally adopted a broad set of security best practices, this certification confirms our ongoing commitment to the security, confidentiality, and high availability of our services.

 

It’s important to understand that ISO 27001 isn’t just a ‘one-off’ audit, but an ongoing and monitored process of continuous improvement, review, and engagement with security standards and processes.

 

What Does This Mean for Our Customers?

You have an assurance that we are operating in a professional manner that highly values security and is compliant with an internationally recognised standard, which has been audited by an accredited third party. This certification also provides additional clarity and assurance to you when evaluating the quality, breadth, and strength of our security practices.

 

If you have any questions about ISO 27001, our certification, and our Information Security Management System (ISMS), please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our Data Protection Officer, at dpo@cogendo.com.

Rob Wheatley

PerformanceHub is GDPR Compliant

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Just a quick note.

Earlier on in May, we released the final 2 tweaks to PerformanceHub to make it 100% GDPR compliant. We did it with no fuss and without sending a billion messages to the world and his wife either.

 

So, you can’t accuse of filling up your inbox with GDPR mails  ;-)

Rob Wheatley

One-to-One Agendas

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We have just released a great new feature for one-to-one meetings: Agendas.

For the 30% of our customers who don’t have one-to-ones turned on (yes, 70% of customers do have it turned on, in fact it’s one of PerformanceHub’s most popular features), one-to-ones is a PerformanceHub feature that enables managers to set-up regular one-to-one meetings with their direct reports; both the manager and direct report can record notes for each meeting.

With this update, you can now enable one-to-one meeting agendas, to help ensure that meetings are focussed, and that the right topics are discussed.

Here’s a screenshot of the new settings in PerformanceHub’s set-up page:

1-2-1 meetings settings

 

 

The keen-eyed would have spotted there are 3 new options to choose from when setting up one-to-ones:

“Meeting agendas”
This is how you turn on the feature. Without ticking this box, everything stays the same. But, once you have ticked it, you get a simple fixed agenda that HR Admin can set and is used for all employees.

“Separate standard agenda for managers”
Tick this box if instead of a single standard agenda you want to have different agendas for managers vs non-managers. Again, HR have control over what these two agendas are.

The standard agendas are edited in a new tab in HR’s Configuration area called “Agendas” – look for it in the main navigation bar once you have turned agendas on. We have created some default ones to get you going. These are applied as soon as you turn on the agenda feature.

“Managers can create team agendas”
Tick this box if you want to allow managers to manage their own agendas. Employees will initially be given a standard agenda as defined by HR (the settings above) but managers will also be able to create their own agendas and assign them to one or more of their direct reports. They will be able to do all of this in the One-to-Ones tab using the “Agendas” link in the sidebar (under the list of direct reports). They can drop back to the standard one at any time from here too, if they wish.

When an agenda has been set, then it will show as a coloured ‘card’ at the top of the meetings list on the One-to-Ones tab. Simple as that.

Should you use agendas?
We think so, even if you just turn on a single fixed agenda under HR’s control to give employees a little guidance on what to talk about in one-to-one meetings.

 

Other changes in this release

  • Employee roles are now ‘pinned’ to the appraisal/probation review rather to a review period. It means that a better history of changes are kept, particularly when roles change between a probation review and an appraisal
  • Several usability tweaks
  • Squished some pesky bugs
Rob Wheatley

User Statuses

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We’ve just released a new version of PerformanceHub with a new feature you may want to make immediate use of, so please read on..
“New User Statuses”

You know how most employees in PerformanceHub are “Enabled”, but there are also statuses like Leaving, Past Employee and Disabled? Well, we’ve expanded the list and added some new functionality so that you can manage users more effectively.

These were the user statuses that we used to use:

But now, you have these choices:

This is how the new and the old statuses map
(green ones are brand new):

As you can see “Active” is the new “Enabled”. We’ve also changed the name of Disabled to “Access Suspended”. When access has been suspended for a user, then they cannot login and they will receive no email from PerformanceHub (just like the Disabled status used to do) but we figured Access Suspended is a ‘friendlier’ term.

The new statuses help you manage users better and will change the way PerformanceHub behaves.

For users marked with; Family Leave, Long Term Sick, Long Term Leave and Sabbatical, they will not receive PerformanceHub email notifications, and their dashboard won’t list things that they need to do (although there’s a message on the dashboard to let them know why). Actions are also removed from the manager’s dashboard for these users. The idea being that they don’t get pestered while they are away. These users are also removed from various reports, so that you’re not chasing your tails trying to get things closed off.

You almost certainly have employees on maternity leave right now, so why not update their status to “Family Leave” today.

The new “Not Reviewed” status is an interesting one. You would use this if you have a user in PerformanceHub that’s there because they need to review direct reports, but they aren’t going to be reviewed themselves. For some of our customers, we have had some special code in place to mark users as “Fake” to deal with this (yes, I know, it’s a silly name!) but now you would deal with this by marking them as “Not Reviewed”. If you are one of the customers using the “Fake User” workaround, we have automatically switched them to “Not Reviewed”.

So manager’s know the status of their direct reports, when a manager has a direct report with statuses other than Active, we put a little icon next to the direct report’s name, so that the manager knows what the score is.

Finally, a brief word about reporting. When a user has a status that means they are unlikely to be progressing things in PerformanceHub, we remove them from various reports or put them in special pots in reports. This will cut down on a lot of ‘red’ in sunburst reports. We also ‘remember’ the status at the end of the review period, so appraisal reports reflect the status of the employee at the time of the review rather than whatever it is now. This brings me to the very last thing (honest) – we have added a new feature when ‘force closing’ appraisals. You can now attach the employee’s status to the appraisal so that reports are more accurate. For instance, if you force close an appraisal because someone is on maternity leave and it is unlikely to get completed, you can tell PerformanceHub this.

Other changes in this release:

  • A new PDP Targets sunburst report. If you have DPDs turned on, you will see it in the sidebar of your dashboard
  • The submitted date has been added to the Interims report, so you can create a ‘burn-up’ chart
  • A new Zone/Partner report for HR Partner management
  • Several usability tweaks
  • Squished some pesky bugs

 

Rob Wheatley

Introducing Appraisal Notes

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Hot on the heels of the last new feature we introduced (Competency Comments), over the weekend we released another new feature – “Appraisal Notes”.

It allows HR and HR Partners to add notes to employee’s appraisals. It can be used as a stand-alone feature or in combination with the Appraisal Tags feature we released late last year.

Please get in touch to find out more.

 

Rob Wheatley

Introducing Competency Comments

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Over the weekend we released a new feature for competency based reviews. It allows managers and direct reports to add comments against individual competencies when reviewing performance against them.

As a bit of background – before the release, if you are using Competencies in PerformanceHub, then at appraisal time the manager and direct report are required to select a performance level for each competency in the DR’s role. The available performance levels are based on your competency framework.

The new Competency Comments feature gives employees the opportunity to add comments to each selection. A little ‘comments’ icon will show users if notes are available and indicate if notes are mandatory (see later).

To turn Competency Comments on, just go to the Configuration page and under the Competencies section, you’ll see a new option for comments. If you enable comments, another option will appear to ask if you want to make comments mandatory. If comments are mandatory, both the manager and direct report must add comments to each competency, otherwise the appraisal cannot be marked as finished.

Rob Wheatley

New feature: Bonus objectives and Objective weights

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In this release:

  • Overall objectives performance summary chart
  • Objective weights
  • Bonus objectives support
  • Various stability and performance updates

We recently updated PerformanceHub with three new features to help get the most out of objectives.

 

1) Overall objectives performance summary chart
A new chart has been introduced in appraisals to give employees a summary of performance against all objectives.

It takes the average rating for all objectives and draws both the manager’s and direct report’s results in the chart, like this:

Average objective performance

The chart is particularly useful when doing an appraisal because it gives you a quick overview of performance against objectives without having to open each objective up.

 

2) Weighted Objectives
When enabled (in HR Admins Configuration screens) all objectives get a weighting. Objective weights can be used to show the relative importance of each objective, and when applied, objectives are listed in weight order, with the highest weighting at the top. Weights are set by the line manager by simply clicking on the icon.

The new weight icon shows, even when objectives are in the list view:

Objective Weights

 

In addition, if set, an objective’s weight is used when calculating the average rating in the new chart mentioned above. The greater the objective’s weight, the more influence performance on that objective has in the chart.

 

3) Bonus Objectives
PerformanceHub now supports bonus objectives. You can enable the feature in the HR Admin Configuration screens. There are a number of configuration sub-options to tell PerformanceHub whether everyone is entitled to a bonus or just some employees. And whether all objectives are bonus objectives or just some. If not all employees are eligible for a bonus, then HR can mark the individuals who are via their profile in the Users tab.

A new icon is used to indicate weather an objective will form part of the bonus payment:

Bonus Objectives

The faded ‘present’ tells the user that the objective does not form part of the bonus calculation and the solid present means that the objective will be included in the calculation.

The line manager decides which objectives are bonused. All they need to do is click on the icon and confirm the change.

HR can generate a new report for bonuses, which provides you with the overall bonus calculations for all eligible employees.

The bonus calculation takes into account an individual’s performance against each bonused objective and a new parameter in the objective rating scheme which tells PerformanceHub how much bonus should be paid for each performance level. For example, you can configure the system such that ‘Good’ performance gives 100% of bonus, better performance gives more than 100% and anything under good gives 0%, but it’s up to you, it’s entirely flexible.

If objectives are weighted, the weighting is also taken into consideration in the bonus calculation.

If you are interested in setting up bonus objectives, then please get in touch and we can help you set it all up.

 

Final Notes
We squished a few bugs, and made some changes to speed up certain pages and reports.

Rob Wheatley

New Feature: One-to-One Meetings Support

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We recently released a new version of PerformanceHub which includes support for One-to-one meetings. You can enable this feature at any time. One-to-one meetings are widely acknowledged as a critical mechanism for ensuring effective communication up and down the organisation, and for building employee engagement.

 

In this post we give an overview of this new feature.

 

When you enable this feature, you get to specify the default meeting interval:

Meeting schedule

Managers can choose to change the meeting frequency on a per-direct-report basis.

 

After having a one-to-one meeting, the manager and/or the direct report can record meeting notes:

Meeting Notes

Both parties don’t have to record notes. For example a manager may ask her direct reports to write up their meetings, and only add her own notes where she wants to add something to the record.

 

After confirming a meeting, you’ll automatically get an entry for your next meeting, with a tentative date (based on the meeting frequency):

More meeting notes

You can record notes in this placeholder, for example as part of your preparation, or to build up a list of topics during the time between meetings.

 

The meeting record for a past meeting is locked 7 days after you confirm the meeting. These meeting notes form part of the historical record for employees, so it’s important that neither party can go back and change the record long after the event. A meeting record is locked even if neither party has recorded any notes.

HR have an interface for browsing all employees, and seeing the meeting configuration at a glance:

Meeting reports

From this HR can see where meetings are overdue, and where managers have changed the meeting interval from the default they set. Clicking on the View button against an employee brings up a meeting viewer, which lets HR page through the meeting records:

HR meetings view

 

PerformanceHub is always evolving, and most of that is driven by customer needs and feedback. Please let us know what you think of this feature, and share any ideas for improving it.

 

Rob Wheatley

PerformanceHub in your team colours

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No need to hide from the Brand Police anymore, PerformanceHub can now support company themes.

You have always been able to add your company logo to PerformanceHub, making it look like a tool in your intranet armoury, but with the introduction of themes, you can now totally change the look of the user interface to match your company’s colour scheme.

If you want to try on a new look, drop us a note and we’ll make one specially for you.

 

Rob Wheatley

New release: Improved text handling

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Over the weekend we released the latest version of PerformanceHub. Here’s a quick note to tell you what’s new.

Improved text input

Text fields that can contain a lot of text will now automatically grow in size as you type. A simple change, but it will help people concentrate on what’s important – the content.

Better ‘forgotten password’ flow

We have noticed that when people forget their password, they will keep trying to guess and may not notice that they can simply reset it and start over. We figured that this could be quite frustrating, so we now make the password reset function a lot more obvious if you try 3 incorrect passwords in a row.

Dashboard Tidy-up

We have given the user’s dashboard a title and changed the layout of the top slightly to make it a little less daunting.

Squished bugs

  • If an external person was asked for provide feedback, the email they received was missing their name.
  • If the grandfather comments were changed on an appraisal, the ‘unsaved changes’ text didn’t appear in the correct place on the appraisal form
  • When using Internet Explorer 8, if you cloned an objective and the description of the original objective had multiple lines of text made with carriage returns, then the carriage returns were not copied to the new objective.