Remember the proud feeling of getting a sticker from the dentist as a kid? Or more recently, the proud feeling of handing out results certificates to students? We love this feeling. So, we’ve worked to ensure it’s never lost, no matter how old you are. After all, who doesn’t appreciate getting recognition?
A schools’ best asset is its staff. And to get the best out of them, managers need to be able to clearly review professional performance and keep tabs on progress. We’ve dedicated a module solely to performance to help our customers keep on top of who is doing well, and who needs a gentle nudge in the right direction.
A new meaning of ‘track and trace’
Tracking performance isn’t always an exact science or something that fits into a tick box exercise. For instance, you could have a member of staff who is the most exceptional teacher but shies away from leading a team. Or, a leader looked up to by all employees, but their teaching alone doesn’t deliver the best results for the school.
Our module breaks performance down into specific criteria (e.g. teaching, non-teaching, and leadership) to distinguish between areas that require different skills. This helps identify certain weaknesses or strengths, then set up distinct courses of action to build on these indicators. We’re pretty proud of that!
Maximum visibility
End-to-end management of performance is crucial to ensuring employee success. It’s no use only a manager being able to track an employees’ progress; the employee needs to see how they’re getting on. Transparency is key to success; if you don’t know where you’re going wrong, how are you ever going to change?
Managers can generate individual objectives and store them within the employee’s portal for easy reference. The integration of the self-service portal allows employees to take responsibility for following and hitting their own performance targets. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t get a kick out of watching our progress, progress!
When it comes to reviews, we like to think we’ve made things easy. So, we let our schools and MATs create templates for performance reviews to allow for quick, efficient, and cohesive evaluations. These templates can be easily accessed across both schools and MATs to implement consistency, especially when making comparisons between employees or subject areas.
Additionally, managers have the option to further amend the review template(s) to increase their specificities to a certain department, role, or aspect.
Bird’s eye view
Where goals are organisation-wide, like in multi-academy trusts, our module gives leaders a bird’s eye view over all schools’ performances. This helps to identify common strengths and weaknesses to promote improvement. In turn, leaders can drill-down to specific schools, then further filter by department, role, or individual staff members.
Performance trends can be discovered; for instance, you may find that a certain department across all schools performs well in a certain area, or that a certain school is more high achieving than others. This presents learning opportunities, with leaders then able to make decisions and strategise for improvement Particular procedures can be intelligently developed and put into place across problem areas to enhance staff and school success.
Opening doors
Having an overview of current and historic progress is the golden ticket to spotting staff members that are overachieving. Nurturing your best performers is an invaluable tool for progression, both in terms of an individual and organisation. Where staff understand what’s expected of them to progress, targets they need to hit, or behaviours they need to aim for, they’re more motivated. Internal promotions allow for fluidity in processes within a school or across a MAT, helping an organisation grow its results.
Fancy all of that in just one module, hey!
