Impacting Employee Performance through SharePoint
Executive Summary
Arshad Consulting is a modern technology solutions provider that uses SharePoint as its intranet. The tech consultancy required an editable performance appraisal system to ensure the privacy of users’ responses and ensure punctuality. Arshad Consultancy needed to set up such a system within the SharePoint intranet they were already using. Additionally, they wanted to follow the hierarchy they had deployed within SharePoint.
Arshad Consulting contacted Xavor to employ their custom development services to design and implement the new performance appraisal system. Xavor noted all of the requirements as stated and delivered a system that ensured punctuality, made navigation easy, and maintained users’ privacy throughout the appraisal process.
By getting Xavor’s custom development services, Arshad Consulting was able to use their SharePoint intranet to improve employee performance via regular feedback and incentivization.
Introduction
Arshad Consulting is a cutting-edge technology solutions company based in Toronto, Canada. Since the start of operations, they have employed Microsoft SharePoint as their intranet and intended to make the necessary customizations to ensure the platform’s utility in the long run.
In their endeavor to adopt SharePoint as the central network for all internal operations, Arshad Consulting required a performance appraisal system that would follow the organization’s hierarchy and enable managers and employees to submit and review performance appraisals on time. This case study informs readers about the particular requirements of the technology solutions provider and how Xavor fulfilled them via custom development for SharePoint.
The Challenge
Microsoft SharePoint has many built-in features that allow intercommunication for feedback. However, a regular SharePoint site was not well suited for this purpose as performance appraisals are private and not intended to be shared with all users on the intranet.
Configuring the performance appraisal forms in a manner that only relevant personnel would be notified and only managers would be able to view the responses was a challenging task. Arshad Consulting required performance appraisals to be filled every quarter, and needed to follow the hierarchy, which started from managers, then followed to team leads and eventually their respective subordinates. The technology solutions provider also wanted to incorporate the managers’ decisions regarding increments and promotions based on the performance review to be added at the end of the year.
The Solution
Arshad Consulting engaged Xavor’s SharePoint development services to design and implement a performance evaluation system that would check all the boxes while staying on the SharePoint platform. Xavor’s team of experts took upon this challenge fervently as a learning opportunity to create a unique performance appraisal system using Sharepoint’s functionality.
The team deployed a system with innovative UI that displayed four quadrants to represent the four quarters. The active quadrant was highlighted for all intranet users to indicate which quarter’s appraisal needed to be filled in. Xavor designed the UI to show the quadrant highlighted in different colors to specify the status of the appraisal form. Users saw the respective quadrant in orange for pending appraisal forms, green for submitted appraisals, and red for overdue forms.
Xavor followed the hierarchy rule by alerting team leads only when their subordinates had submitted their appraisals. Likewise, managers got alerts to review the performance appraisals after team leads reporting to them had completed theirs. Per company policy, the users’ responses were hidden from team leads and were only visible to the managers.
To further simplify matters for managers while reviewing their team’s appraisal forms, Xavor designed a side-by-side view of the team leaders and their subordinate’s responses as the managers had to compare them. The managers also saw additional fields to enter information regarding increments, bonuses, and promotions for each employee only after the fourth quarter. In this way, Xavor followed an intuitive path to ensuring that decisions pertaining to performance appraisals were stored alongside the review and were submitted on time.
Punctuality was a concern for Arshad Consulting, and Xavor configured email notifications sent to relevant users when their performance appraisals were due. Managers and team leaders also had access to change questionnaires in the performance appraisals according to the nature of work.
Outcomes
Arshad Consulting obtained a performance appraisal system built within the SharePoint intranet that followed the organization’s hierarchy as designed and emailed the employees based on their information on the intranet. The performance appraisal system delivered the following unique benefits:
- Intuitively Designed UI to help employees navigate the system with ease
- Hierarchical appraisal structure to ensure privacy and fair reviews
- Automated email notifications to guarantee punctual form submission
Through the new performance appraisal system, Arshad Consulting provided regular feedback to all employees and helped them improve their performance through incentives such as increments and promotions.
Conclusion
Xavor Corporation has been a Microsoft Gold Partner for 25 years and holds a Gold Certification in Collaboration and Content, making us a reliable partner for SharePoint development solutions. Our team strives to continuously improve themselves and take on challenges to benefit the SharePoint community and raise the level of excellence with customized development.
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