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
Trakstar Perform
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Trakstar's Performance Appraisal software helps HR and organization manage feedback, goals and reviews. The user can build customized appraisal forms, set SMART goals, and create flexible workflows to meet the needs of an organization. 360/Multi-rater feedback is an option. Trakstar's implementation is customized, and Trakstar offers a free trial, price quote, or a live demo from a real person.
This is a great program if you have locations in different geographical areas. The ability to work with people at different locations is appreciated, and also there can be informal input that is requested, which Promantek can handle as well. I am at a loss to think of an area where this does not work well. There are several of our employees in the manufacturing areas that do not have computer access, and for those individuals, we simply print the review instead of having it online. This works fine but is not the forte of Promantek. However, any system these days that focusses on the online aspects of review writing will experience that as well.
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.
Trakstar sends out a lot of automated reminders to participants, encouraging them to take notes and provide feedback on a regular basis.
Trakstar generates analysis (i.e., rater bais) automatically that would otherwise be labor intensive to do manually.
Trakstar has a feature that allows administrators to see what each individual employee sees - this is critical in ensuring that the performance review process goes smoothly.
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.
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.
Trakstar has been very responsive to my questions and support has been able to speak with me on the phone as needed. Also, when I told Trakstar that my employees were not delighted by the product, they did a special session with me to diagnose any issues and to make recommendations for how I could improve the tool's usefulness in my job. I appreciated their support here
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.
I did not make the purchase decision for Trakstar, but at a previous job I used Reflektive. Many of the outcomes of the tool are the same, even if the product interface and language is slightly different
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 have had few managers dread the review writing process! Sure, no one enjoys this and we all know that it is time-consuming, but Promantek has allowed less time spent in frustration and more time actually communicating effectively. There are areas where managers can make notes during the entire review process so that when the time to write the review is upon you, it is a much simpler task. This has allowed us to free up the time with managers to a certain degree which is always beneficial.
