What Have You Done?

In many workplaces—particularly small, busy ones—employees often don’t understand all their assignments, priorities, or deadlines. They may be working toward goals that aren’t quantified—management may want to increase sales, for instance, but no one says how much or by when. Vague assignment details make it difficult to identify success or failure, so managers may have a weak sense of which employees are performing well or poorly.

For a new software company, it’s a situation that provides a strong sense of opportunity.

Achievance HR, developed by Dayton, Minnesota–based Achievance, is a Web-hosted application that allows managers to assign tasks, indicating which projects get higher or lower priority, as well as the deadlines for each. Employees can use the system to schedule their time, monitor deadlines, and communicate back and forth with higher-ups regarding a project’s status.

Once an Achievance account is set up and the client company plugs in its hierarchies, managers can check in to monitor project status and see how well employees accomplish goals. This allows managers to measure how individuals, departments, divisions, and the company as a whole are meeting project tasks and goals. Particularly at smaller companies, many employees “work across” different departments. Employees and managers can also use the software to record accomplishments over time, allowing them to focus annual reviews around facts, not vague impressions of job performance.

“This takes the traditional yearly review and makes it an ongoing conversation,” says Diana Van Blaricom, Achievance’s chief solutions officer. “There’s not a big mystery at the end of the year about what you’ve done.”

As it facilitates communication and tracks performance, the software also “forces managers to think harder about assigning goals in the first place,” she adds. Rather than allowing users to create vague objectives, the system prompts supervisors to assign goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant.

Achievance HR is the brainchild of Van Blaricom and company CEO Delmar Dehn, who met when both worked at St. Paul–based Lawson Software. Van Blaricom was a human resources applications product manager, while Dehn was a product manager for server technology, responsible for developing software necessary to run Lawson applications. Dehn and Van Blaricom saw an underserved niche in online HR software for firms too big to manage employees by walking around and chatting, but too small to afford a customized, onsite product. They started Achievance in July 2006, targeting companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees.

Achievance HR costs $9.95 per month, per user, Dehn adds, with month-to-month subscriptions and no contracts. “There’s no ‘we paid a million dollars for this thing, so by gosh we’re going to make it work,’” Van Blaricom says. “We have to do well by the customer.”