Using Continuous Performance Management to Increase Work Performance

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to Describe and use the different views of Continuous Performance Management and their main functions.

Primary Features of Continuous Performance Management

The primary features associated with Continuous Performance Management include:

  • Employee Activities

    • Create activities and add attachments on activities to instantly record employee efforts and provide visibility to what they are working on.

    • Display employee achievements in real-time, using the Achievements view.

    • Request feedback from and give feedback to other employees as well as monitor the status of feedback requests.

    • Link activities directly to performance goals and development goals and view them in the Performance Review form.

    • View activities grouped by time or goal.

  • Meetings
    • Structure 1:1 meetings with manager and employees and open additional channels to involve other roles in the process, using Multiple Role Support.

    • Create topics for discussion between manager and employee.

    • Capture meeting discussions and track content of meeting in meeting history.

    • Configure status labels and icon colors for Activity and Topic.

    • Access feature via the web and on mobile application (iOS and Android).

Main Functions of the Activities View

Most of the actions in Continuous Performance Management are performed in the Activities view. You can easily track your work and that of your direct reports by:

  • Creating and monitoring activities

  • Assigning an appropriate status to the activities

  • Linking the activities to performance goals and development goals

  • Viewing feedback linked to an activity and make it visible to the manager

  • Adding updates to activities

The Activities View

Watch this video to learn more about the Activities View.

What is an Activity?

In Continuous Performance Management, an Activity is an entity that enables the employee to track the items that they are working on.

Activities can be personal to you or your direct reports, and they can be easily linked to one of the performance or development goals. For example, you might be working on a big presentation to land a new client or contract. The activity might very well have relevance to your performance goal of increasing revenue for the company by a certain percentage. The things you are working on may or may not be related to a goal, but they can be captured as activities.

Note

A manager can view and add updates to the activities added by their direct reports. The manager can also create activities on behalf of the employees reporting to them.

Time stamps are visible when a new comment to an activity is added or updated. This provides users temporal context around the comments made to their listed activities.

Add an Activity

You can create an activity either for yourself or your direct reports, and link the activities to performance and development goals.

Steps

  1. On the Activities view, select Create Activity.

  2. Enter the activity name.

  3. Select an activity status from the dropdown list.

    • High: The activity is a high priority item, something that must be attended to immediately.

    • Medium: The activity is a priority but it can wait a day or two.

    • Low: The activity should be taken up when there is time.

    • Paused: The activity is currently on hold.

    • Complete: The activity has been successfully completed.

    • Canceled: The activity is no longer being worked on, but details are preserved.

  4. Within the Linked Goals section, you can add a link to a Performance Goal or Development Goal. New goals can be also created from this option, if needed.

  5. Additionally, you can add attachments to your activity, with a maximum number of 5.

  6. Select Save.

    Note

    End users can update the status of an activity using drag and drop directly on the Activities view. You do not necessarily have to edit an activity to change its status.

Attachments

Users can add attachments to activities and provide additional context or demonstrate work done in association with an activity. This feature, called Enable Attachments on Activities must be turned on from Continuous Performance Management Configuration.

Permissions Associated with Attachments

To grant permission to upload and download attachments, select Activity → Visibility: View and Action: Edit in Manage Permission Roles → User Permission → Continuous Performance Management

To grant permission to only download attachments, select Activity → Visibility: View in Manage Permission Roles → User Permission → Continuous Performance Management.

Note

A maximum of five attachments per activity are allowed. Allocations for file size and storage are defined in document management services in Provisioning. Several file types, like PDF, DOC, JPG, PPT, TXT are supported. For additional information, you can check the Using Continuous Performance Management guide in the SAP Help Portal.

Add Updates

Updates can be added to exchange ideas on an activity between managers and employees either from the Activities view or the Meeting view. A comment icon will display when updates have been posted. The update entered on each activity will be sorted from the most recent at the top to the oldest at the bottom. Additionally, an email notification can be configured to alert an employee whenever a manager updates an employee activity. This method is faster than having to continually navigate into Continuous Performance Management to check for activity updates.

Note

Configuration of this email notification requires changes to E-Mail Notification Templates and to the Continuous Performance Management Activity in Intelligent Services.

Steps

  1. On the Activities view screen, select any activity, and post an activity update. An activity must first be created in order to add updates to it.

  2. The update can be edited or deleted but only by the original author of this activity update.

Capture Meetings

Watch this video to learn more about the Meeting view in Continuous Performance Management. 

Main Functions of the Achievements View

The Achievements view captures the accomplishments that managers and employees have achieved in the work place. Traditionally employees have had to wait until the end of the year to record all they have accomplished to justify a request for a merit increase or promotion.

This view allows managers and employees to display all achievements in real-time, drill down into achievement details to check for linked goals and feedback received for the activities that were turned into achievements, and create new achievements that will also create an activity under the same name and will be available from the Activities view.

Watch this video to learn more about the Achievements view.

Adding Achievements

Achievements will be added automatically when the Activity status is set to Complete. However, you can specify a different activity status to prompt an achievement creation from the Admin Console.

You can also create an achievement from the Achievements view and it will also create an activity with the same name.

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