Probation Reviews

PerformanceHub now supports probation reviews to help you with your employee onboarding process.

Many organisations have a probation period for new starters. Often just thought of as a “safety net” to catch poor hiring decisions, they are an important period in the early stages of a new employee’s appointment. During this period, new employees should be given a sufficient level of support to enable them to become an effective member of the team. PerformanceHub provides new appointments, their manager and HR the platform to do this, and now, PerformanceHub will ensure that probation reviews are conducted on time and with an appropriate audit trail.

Before moving onto the details, we would like to thank all our customers who helped us design probation reviews. It’s been a while coming, but all those comments you made on our early specifications have paid off, so thank you for your support. For any other customers reading this, if you would like to help influence PerformanceHub’s roadmap and features, please let us know and we will include you in our product programme.

How probation reviews work in PerformanceHub

Probation reviews are a new feature you can enable in Configuration. Once enabled, there are a number of sub-options you can also configure which we’ll cover below, but essentially new starters can be put on probation. The length of the probation period can be changed on a per employee basis, but will default to whatever you have set in your config.

An employee who is in probation does not go into the ‘normal’ appraisal review cycle. Instead, they have a probation review that needs to be completed at the end of their probation period. A probation review is similar to a regular appraisal, but the information collected in it can be different if required. These are the stages of the probation review:

1. The manager and new starter are asked to start the review before it’s due (how far in advance is configurable)
2. The manager needs to make a recommendation for HR to approve (Pass, Extend or Fail). This recommendation and any notes the manager has entered into the review are not visible to the new starter at this point and a manager cannot progress any further until the recommendation has been approved by HR. Note that, depending on your “2nd Line Manager” settings, the 2nd line manager can also be involved in the probation review
3. Once approved, the manager can share their review with the new starter and the review can be completed much like a normal appraisal
4. Once the finished review is submitted to HR, HR can close the review. PerformanceHub automatically deals with the next step depending on the result of the review. If the new starter passed, they are put into the normal appraisal cycle. If they failed, the new starter’s account is marked as a Past Employee. If the result was to extend the probation period, then a new probation review is created and the old one kept on record.

All other aspects of PerformanceHub work in the same way, ie, a new starter can have objectives, 1-to-1 meetings, a development plan etc.

HR have a new Probation Manager screen that allows them to manage probations. HR’s dashboard has also been updated to include important probation review information.

Configuration sub-options

Once enabled, you can set the following sub-options:

• Default duration: This is the default duration of a probation period. If your new starter has a different duration, this can be changed when you add them to PerformanceHub
• Prompt manager time: This is the time before the probation review is due the manager is asked to start the review. The default is 2 weeks, but it can be changed to give a longer lead-in if required
• Default on probation: If set, all new starters will be put on probation by default. You can opt a new starter out of probation when you add them to PerformanceHub or visa-versa, depending on whatever your ‘norm’ is
• Give managers an objective: If set, whenever a manager gets a new starter in their team, the manager of the new starter will automatically be set an objective to ensure a successful onboarding (their manager will review them against this objective)
• Probation review sections: Just like you can add sections to an appraisal, you can also add them to a probation review. These could be the same as your regular appraisal form, or you may wish to make a probation review slightly different