You Are Here: > Home > Resources > Datasheets > TotalPerformance™

Solutions that drive business

TotalPerformance™ Datasheet

SumTotal's TotalPerformance™ is a complete Employee Performance Management (EPM) software suite that enables you to keep your employees informed, aligned, accountable and developed in order to greater support your organization's strategy. By strengthening the talent in your organization, you will have teams ready to achieve real business results.

TotalPerformance software provides the functionality you need now, with extensive flexibility and scalability to position your employee performance management system for any changes the future may bring. TotalPerformance becomes the key tool to drive your talent management strategy forward.

All TotalPerformance modules are fully compatible with each other, sharing and exchanging data across modules to produce more useful reporting and analytics giving you up-to-date insight on your talent development. Dashboards are available via e-mail, and our TotalPerformance ToGo® offline capability offers the most sophisticated data synchronization available. Additionally,  TotalPerformance integrates with TotalLMS, SumTotal's learning management system.

Whether you choose an on-demand hosted model, or prefer to purchase a software license for in-house installation, TotalPerformance delivers everything you need at a fixed, inclusive price including total project implementation and administration.

TotalPerformance modules

  • Goal Management
  • Performance Appraisals
  • Multi-rater/360 Feedback
  • Workforce & Succession Planning
  • ToGo®


Goal Management

TotalPerformance's Goal Management module promotes effective and immediate two-way communication.

The hierarchical goal structure allows easy alignment among:

  • Organizational Goals
  • Departmental Goals
  • Individual Goals

Employees have a clear line of sight to strategic organizational objectives, and executives and managers can easily review team and individual goals. At each level, managers or employees can define sub-goals as well as copy, edit and/or cascade goals. 

E-mail notifications help ensure that employees record progress on each goal. Supervisors and executives can monitor when and how frequently managers and employees update their plans and progress notes. Any slippage or changes to goal deadlines trigger e-mail alerts. Goal alignment reporting helps you identify exactly where you may have gaps in alignment with strategic goals avoiding surprises at the end of the year when strategic goals aren't met.

Performance Appraisals

TotalPerformance transforms your annual or quarterly performance appraisal event to a mainstream, daily activity. Using performance logs, supervisors and employees record ongoing comments and notes. Goals and tracking data feed directly into performance appraisal templates. And, TotalPerformance's flexible architecture allows the system to be configured to match your unique templates and workflows.
 
For performance appraisals and 360 feedback, Visual Profiler™ drag and drop rating interface is a time-saving, easy, intuitive rating tool. Visual Profiler more accurately reflects the way people appraise others in their day-to-day life resulting in significant increases in employee participation. Visual Profiler™ can be used to assess one employee on multiple competencies or you can save time by rating multiple employees at a time against each competency.

Many customers also choose to include other rating formats, such as Likert scales, for other performance appraisal components.

Raters can leave detailed comments, with full support from the TotalPerformance Comment Assistant, spell check, and Legal Minder™ language scanner.

Comments in the ongoing performance log can be copied directly into the performance appraisal, and edited if required. Customizable e-mail reminders keep everyone on track.

Multi-rater/360 Feedback

For raters who have many individuals to score, Visual Profiler's unique ability to rate multiple individuals simultaneously streamlines what can become a time-consuming process. Customers have experienced up to an 80% time savings using this approach.

Using Visual Profiler also improves the quality of ratings, providing finer distinction in scores to better differentiate performance. TotalPerformance also supports other rating formats (e.g., Likert 5-point scales) in addition to Visual Profiler.

TotalPerformance can accommodate any number of raters and ratees, and all varieties of content, reporting relationships, and scheduling (focal or anniversary, calendar-driven or ad hoc). Users select and notify raters using TotalPerformance, and automatic e-mail reminders help ensure ratings are completed on time.

Workforce & Succession Planning

TotalPerformance's Workforce & Succession Planning enables you to assess current talent, and plan for the future.

Performance and potential ratings can be gathered through special purpose talent assessment surveys, or can be fed into the talent planning process from an existing performance appraisal.
Data can also be imported from external systems to eliminate duplicate data entry and integrated with TotalPerformance data for a complete succession planning picture.

Supervisors and HR have at-a-glance access to an employee's current position summary, targeted positions and succession paths.

The career summary includes performance history and ratings regarding potential, along with links to related performance reviews. Employees can target multiple future positions and view gap analysis reports detailing developmental needs to reach targeted positions. An online resume, created and maintained by employees, supervisors and human resource administrators, can be accessed when searching the employee database for succession candidates.

ToGo®

The sophisticated ToGo module provides users the ability to work offline, then reconnect to the network and synchronize changes.

ToGo eliminates the problems inherent in other offline systems, which lock out other users when offline data are “checked out.”  By contrast, ToGo's sophisticated synchronization technology allows all users to access the system at all times, and can reconcile data on a line-by-line basis if entries are changed both on and offline.

Development resource library

Development goals link to TotalPerformance's developmental resource library, which includes more than 2,500 developmental ideas and activities, coaching suggestions, and a variety of other learning media, as well as online links for seminar or program registration. TotalPerformance can be populated with client-specific resources, including links to learning management software. Each resource is linked to relevant competencies.

Special features and functionality

Reporting and analytics

TotalPerformance's self-service reporting gathers data from its multiple modules and other systems such as LMS or absence management for sophisticated analytics.

We're constantly adding to our standard library of hundreds of graphical, easy-to-interpret reports in three general categories: individual, operational and executive.

TotalPerformance supports the following report formats: Text-only, rich text, comma delimited text, HTML, PDF, Word and Excel.

TotalPerformance dashboards provide information at a glance to any audience you choose. Dashboard content, presentation and security are completely configurable by user group, by process, or any other configuration. Dashboards can also incorporate data from other systems.

In addition to the traditional dashboard approach, TotalPerformance can deliver dashboards via email, without requiring users to log in to the system. If the user wants to drill down for more information, the e-mailed dashboards' links provide shortcuts into TotalPerformance.

Your dedicated SumTotal project engineer will help you determine reporting and dashboard needs, and help you create ad hoc, custom reports as, required; all included in your fixed price.

In the sample 360 degree feedback individual report shown here  represents the employee's self-rating,  represents the supervisor's rating, and  represents other raters.

It is easy to see where raters agree, as the symbols cluster along the vertical competency bar. The horizontal white bar represents the median rating for each competency, clearly showing where the lowest and highest median scores fall. With this type of report, employees get a complete picture of their strengths and weaknesses  and even blind spots where their self-ratings may be out of line with others' perceptions.

Calibration

The TotalPerformance system includes a powerful data-calibration tool that lets executives view individuals  across multiple supervisors in a comparative context. This tool provides a flexible, easy-to-use method for the executive team to edit and approve ratings given to employees, resulting in consistent application of standards. Any ratings changes made during the calibration process are tracked, so a thorough audit trail is always available.

Competency Models

TotalPerformance uses your organization's existing competency framework. Or, you can include our optional Enhanced Leadership Competency Model which applies across industries. For job-specific competencies, we partner with ITG Competency Group to offer their off-the-shelf competency models integrated with TotalPerformance. Or, if you prefer, we will provide consultation to help you develop your own competency models.

Organizational surveys

TotalPerformance also includes surveying tools for employee satisfaction, other organizational surveys and even customer surveys. Results are easy to generate and interpret, and can be easily distributed to stakeholders.

Legal Minder™

SumTotal's Legal Minder™ language scanner flags potentially risky language, offering guidelines and alternative wording for performance appraisal writers.

As easy as using a spell check, Legal Minder can analyze one comment or an entire appraisal. Legal Minder can also be set to filter at various levels of strictness.

Email reminders

TotalPerformance includes a very sophisticated yet easy-to-use email notification module, which reminds users of events, milestones and deadlines related to performance processes. Email notification pushes information out to the users' e-mail inbox, so they do not have to log into the TotalPerformance system everytime.

The automated email functionality is fully integrated into the system workflow model, and can trigger email notifications automatically without requiring administrative intervention. Customers have full control over content and mailing lists, as well as how and when notices go out.

SumTotal has extensive experience integrating with most e-mail systems, including Exchange-based systems, Notes-based systems and proprietary e-mail processing.

Integration with your other systems

The initial implementation of your TotalPerformance system depends on accurate, up-to-date employee data.  On an ongoing basis, your TotalPerformance dashboards, reports and other functions may include performance-related data from external systems like financial, sales compensation and absence-tracking systems  and even Balanced Scorecard systems.

We know the tricks and how to avoid potential pitfalls, and have incorporated sophisticated verification checks and the ability to add fields once data are imported. Our years of experience include extracting and exchanging data with all kinds of systems, including Oracle/ PeopleSoft, SAP and a myriad of in-house systems  including legacy systems. In fact, we created the first interface for performance management software with an HRIS database (DataBond®) ten years ago.