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
eFront Learning
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
eFront is a flexible LMS platform for enterprises that need advanced security measures and extensive customization to train masses of employees, partners, and customers. According to the vendor, eFront is designed to be an adaptable enterprise LMS, and gives users complete control over their virtual training environment and data. Additionally, the vendor says it blends well with any other infrastructure. The vendor’s value proposition is that eFront helps the user’s business grow…
You must have an IT staff with knowledge of PHP in order to install and maintain the system. This is not a plug and play solution by any means. If you have that staff, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's a very robust system. Once we solved initial bugs caused by our own errors during installation, the support desk requests have dropped to almost zero, with nearly 2,000 users online every day. That's a good, solid program.
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.
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
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.
I'm not sure what else is out there that has the ability to do what our organization needs. We've come across things we didn't like about it, but due to costs of switching and possibly lack of other options, we'd probably renew with eFront. Also, we've invested a lot of time in the software and it seems to be satisfactory at this point.
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.
For most situations, it is extremely easy to learn and use. There are ergonomic issues that seem a bit tedious, but overall, we are seeing a very high success rate with new registrants. They are learning the material and earning their certificates at a rapid pace. This is a good program once it is properly installed by a knowledgeable systems architect.
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.
Two disadvantages: 1. Many staffers who respond don't know how to solve the problem using the User Interface - they want to work from the back end, to which I have no access. 2. The support staff are in Europe and I am in California, so there is an overnight delay in getting a response.
I'm not the most technical person, so some of the training didn't make sense to me. It wasn't a complete training - it was more topical. The people working at EFront were happy to answer my questions later when I resorted to learning it by doing. This was very valuable to me.
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
It's important to have a robust course catalog before launching. Courses should be QC'ed to be sure there are no errors or other problems. Don't let engineers write quiz questions! Remember that well-formed quiz questions are not designed to trick or fool the user - they are used to reinforce learning through repetition of important concepts. The "grade" isn't as important as the assurance the information has stuck.
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.
Unfortunately I have not had the chance to try other products, however I would think eFront would stack up fairly well against competitors and it provides all the necessary tools to stay compliant and excel at having efficient KICs.
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.