Cornerstone’s PiiQ is an SMB offering formerly known as Sonar6. PiiQ is aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses and includes core learning management and performance management systems, including content creation, mobile accessibility, and in-product reporting.
$8
per user per month
Culture Amp
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Culture Amp is an employee engagement software offering with functionalities such as employee pulse survey, onboarding feedback collection, and analysis of employee feedback.
Culture Amp is a great tool for employee surveys, and has been able to scale with us for 5+ years. It's customizable and helps provide rich data on how employees are feeling so that we can continue to use that feedback to improving our company culture quarter over quarter.
Enables employees to draft work goals and collaborate with their supervisors on a final version - improves mutual understanding right up front.
Combines performance goal ratings with competency ratings and provides a blended score. Simplifies the goal weighting so you don't have to do any calculations.
9-box matrix provides useful definitions and descriptions so managers can prepare development notes or plans for individual employees.
The Culture Amp support team is unparalleled. They offer live chat support as well as office hours that you can attend for help on anything from technical issues to the best way to phrase a survey question. They are always willing to help and are experts in their field.
The report pages are very detailed and it's easy to view the data in a lot of different ways. This helps with more insightful analysis.
I love that you can benchmark your survey results to your industry/region; it helps a lot to give context to your results.
Would be good to have have a virtual "top level" (eg board) user built in to allow senior execs without a direct manager to be able to be set up with KPIs instead of having to create a dummy user
Reports have difficulty downloading if pop ups disabled or in some browser environments
When competencies are updated while a cycle is open, any changes don't effect that open cycle but only future ones. Would be nice to be able to have the option to apply changes to existing "open" cycles
They recently launched a text analytics feature but I think it still needs some work. I don't find the attributes of sentiment to comments to make complete sense. Text analytics are also not yet available for export so it makes it very difficult to share with others in presentations and reports outside of the system.
Currently they don't have the ability to set an automated file with and connect with an HRIS (at least not with Ultimate) so every time you want to refresh your users you have to upload a new file feed manually (which is pretty simple, it is just impossible to set the refresh on autopilot).
It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.
There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.
The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.
My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.
I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.
I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads
Lesson.ly has been great to work with but it is a very clear and simple, user-friendly system that anyone can pick up with very little training as it is self-explanatory. It also has a great mobile interface and lots of different features that are easy to add for the admin but really impactful for the user.
Culture Amp is the first such tool I have used. I find it to be very well rounded and useful, especially since culture is one of the trickiest parts of a business to get a hold of as related to the bottom line. The fact that followup on goals and feedback can be done thanks to the platform is a very strong point.
It's tool and it's only as good as the person wielding it. The investment in PiiQ was accompanied by a quarterly cadence and manager feedback training. We feel like our employees are given regular feedback and bonuses are tied to objective accomplishment.
We use culture amp to measure engagement levels surrounding certain "standard" questions we ask on a recurring basis. this gives us a viable way to measure how we are doing overall in certain areas that are important to us.
The Diversity survey helped us pinpoint some areas were we could work on improving. This came out in comments from several users.
We have to keep in mind that comments are important, but sometimes it is just one person who is upset about one thing that does not affect anyone else. We must keep that in mind and set those aside. It is easy to get caught up in some of those comments.
