Your team grows because you’re hitting your goals. But the more you grow, the slower that progress seems to get, and the harder it can be to determine why that slowdown is happening. That’s usually when you start using spreadsheets and other manual trackers to manage performance across teams and managers, trying to pinpoint performance issues and opportunities to improve them. But these manual methods don’t just cost significant time and admin work to use and maintain; they’re not particularly effective. That’s why growing teams need performance management platforms.
But not all of these platforms can scale with you. In this guide, you’ll find out why teams need these platforms and what they need from these platforms.
Key Takeaways
The processes and systems you use at a headcount of 50 often strain, or even break, at a headcount of 200. Communication becomes more difficult, projects become more intricate, and team structures become more complex. There are more collaborators and more managers, which makes everything from knowing who’s responsible for a specific project to tracking manager effectiveness more challenging.
This extra complexity translates to how you use performance platforms, too.
Tools built for small teams can handle the basics of performance management, making them a strong upgrade from the spreadsheets and manual trackers most HR teams use at a certain size. You might get basic reporting, simple employee engagement surveys, and a straightforward directory of managers and employees. But you likely won’t get detailed dashboards, AI-assisted data analysis, or deep manager enablement features. You might not feel that absence early on, but you will when you scale.
Once your organization reaches a certain size (and level of complexity), you need more advanced features that these basic tools can’t support. Knowing where HR initiatives need to focus to have the most impact is much easier when your entire team fits in a boardroom than when it’s scattered throughout multiple cities. Software needs to give you the data and the capability to find these opportunities and capitalize on them.
When your organization hits a growth spurt, the gap between what a platform is built for and what you need out of it becomes much larger. You need one that doesn’t have that gap at all.
A performance platform should help centralize as much of the people data as you need. Performance data, employee engagement signals, employee retention, and manager effectiveness trends should all be tied together in one platform, rather than scattered across siloed dashboards.
Performance platforms should scale with your data analysis ability. Early on, when you might not have dedicated analysts, they should give you data that leads to actionable insights without advanced analysis. But when you have dedicated analysts, they should support their in-depth reviews.
One of the most challenging aspects of adding a software tool to your stack is making sure it scales with you. Too many tools feel over-engineered when your teams are smaller, like they’re built for massive organizations. Then, other tools that seem like a better fit for small teams can’t keep up when your teams grow.
When you evaluate a performance platform, review its ability to scale with you. You can do that by having conversations with salespeople and customer success agents, reading case studies, or reviewing websites to see the kind of customers vendors highlight.
The faster your teams grow, the more team and department structure needs to change. That means hiring (or promoting) more and more managers, often without the seniority to handle all management tasks without support. Most organizations know to set up regular check-ins with managers to track their progress and give support where needed. But a performance platform built to scale goes beyond that, providing built-in resources and e-learning so managers can learn on their own between check-ins.
A performance platform should provide better tracking for manager effectiveness as well, helping you determine who needs coaching.
Turnover, performance issues, and manager risk rarely come out of nowhere. Usually, there are trends that can signal these issues before they arise. But most teams don’t get to see these trends until the issue’s already happened and they’re looking back.
A performance platform should give you visibility on these trends ahead of time. By tracking performance data, manager effectiveness, and employee engagement over time, these platforms can surface trends and give you the opportunity to act before a disengaged employee becomes a former employee.
AI is changing the way teams work in all industries, and HR is no different. Performance management platforms with built-in AI features can help streamline work like gathering and analysing data, answering routine questions, drafting performance reviews, and summarizing meetings.
Many performance management platforms now have AI features at some level, and evaluating these can be challenging. If you have the ability to run a pilot project and test several tools, test AI features in practice and see their impact.
As your teams grow, you start adding tools to your stack to handle issues as they come up. A small team might not use an HRIS or an applicant tracking system, but as you grow, these rapidly become just a few tools of many. Data about teams, managers, and their work is scattered across all these platforms, making it difficult for anyone to get full visibility on what’s actually happening.
A performance platform should connect with all these different tools, centralizing people data so you can operate from a single place instead of constantly having to switch back and forth between them.
As your organization grows, it’ll fall under more and more data security and compliance requirements. That means the tools you need should help you stay compliant. Generic certifications like SOC 2 demonstrate a satisfactory commitment to data security, while certifications and compliance specific to certain industries (e.g., HIPAA in healthcare) or jurisdictions (e.g., GDPR in Europe) are worth evaluating as well.
Now that you know what a platform needs to scale with you, here are some signs to look for in platforms that won’t scale:
Your performance platform needs to give you better data, better opportunities to act, and better support for managers. It also needs to do that in ways that match your needs whether you have a headcount of 10 or 10,000.
That’s where 15Five comes in.
15Five is a dedicated performance management platform that unites performance, engagement, and retention, connecting the signals you need to get the full picture of what’s happening, what needs to happen, and what you can do.
Configurable workflows scale with your organization, manager enablement and the Manager Effectiveness Indicator develop new leaders, and AI-Assisted Reviews and Focus Briefs help a growing team stay consistent, with managers in control.
15Five also connects with your existing HRIS and other HR tools, centralizing all the people data you need to take better action.
Want to see what 15Five can do for your organization? Book a demo here.