One of our main clients, one of the biggest law firms in Spain, was anually carrying out an internal evaluation process of their lawyers and staff.

The processed was managed by the HR department in a “manual fashion”:

• There was an Excel sheet with questions that required a numerical answer (from one to five in this particular case) plus a few open questions that should be answered both by the employee and its line manager.
• All the workflow was email based, i.e.:
  • A blank copy of the Excel file was first sent to the evaluated employee that after fulfilling the requested data was sent back to HR.
  • The document was then sent to the line manager that after completing its part would return it to HR.
  • At this point the RH department will parse the data of each spreadsheet and if needed return it by email to the line manager for fine-tuning.
  • Upon arrival of a consensus a document was printed and a meeting of all parts involved was agreed to finally sign the final evaluation.
  • The final signed evaluation was stored in a folder for future use, for example to determine the applied bonus at the end of the year.

Or in a few words: quite a resource consuming nightmare that resulted in:

• Data stored in a not easily retrivable format.
• Isolated data that could not be used for the compound evaluation of departments or work groups.
• An error prone procedure.
• The practical impossibility of direct tracking by management.
• No “added inteligence” .

Just by migrating the Excel sheet to a Word document that was easily tagged:

• The process became a fully online process.
• All data was automatically saved in each edition in the browser avoiding unwanted losses of information.
• At any moment the RH department had online access to the data and could print, if required, the documents that were dynamically generated from the Word template and the saved data.
• The privacy and security of all the process was guaranteed.
• Evaluations could be open and closed remotely by authorised personnel from the RH department giving them complete control on the process workflow.
• Automatic reports built out of the user data were generated with useful charts that help to interpret the data at first sight.
• It became trivial to compare perceived performance of different employees within a department or group as well as assess consolidated department or group data.
• Employees and line managers, besides online access, could also at any time generate a document in PDF format with all the information as long as they were granted permission to do so.

Moreover all the gathered data will remain available so authorised personell will be able to access it at anytime and for its predefined purposes or future ones that may not have even been foreseen as we speak.

Or, again, in a few words: quite a change.

And all of it at the fraction of the costs of a specialised tool or a custom IT development.