The focus for this month’s update to Cezanne HR has been to provide even better support for activities that are top of the agenda for many HR professionals at this time of year: employee performance and development.

John Hixon, Director of R&D for Cezanne HR explains: “The end of the year is always a busy time for HR teams, especially for those wrapping up and restarting yearly review cycles, or planning training and development for the year ahead. We were looking for ways to help them manage these activities more easily, and provide faster insight into key information”.

Cezanne HR’s integrated performance module automates the review cycle, routing performance planning and appraisal activities to the right people at the right time, saving HR hours of time and helping to ensure reviews get completed on time. However, as Peter Hall, Head of UK customer services at Cezanne HR explains, the administrative element of the activity doesn’t stop once the performance review cycle has been kicked off.

“Organisations change constantly; new people join, teams are restructured, people get promoted, participants leave”, Peter explains. “For HR, that means they may need to add new employees into a review cycle, re-route appraisals through different participants or perhaps even allocate employees to different performance review forms or cycles that are more appropriate to their new responsibilities. This can be quite a headache, especially if you’ve got a workforce hundreds or thousands of employees.”

The tools that allowed HR to track progress and manage these events have been grouped together into a new performance hub and more controls added. “Customers will find that it’s not only easier to check that review cycles are running smoothly but make these kinds of changes too.” says Peter.

Another significant enhancement in this release is at the security level, with the option for HR administrators to allow restricted HR users (typically regional or country HR administrators who are only allowed to see data for a subset of employees) to take on more responsibility for performance reviews and report building. “Central HR teams now have the freedom to open up tools that were designed just for them to colleagues elsewhere in the business without having to worry about compromising essential data privacy and security”; explains John Hixon.

A similar principal has been applied to the Career and Succession module, with HR now able to choose to make visible the career plans and performance and potential screens to a wider audience – which could include the employee themselves. “Feedback from customers has been that this information is enormously helpful for both employee retention and development, so they wanted to be able to make greater use of it,”, explains John Hixon.

Other enhancements in this release include smoother process for posting vacancies to LinkedIn for the recruitment module, and changes to the mobile apps to enable an upcoming update to time off in lieu for Android and iOS.

Full information about these features and the other enhancements available in this release, are available to customers through the Cezanne HR support portal.