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All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
Objectives and OKRs, KRA and 9-box, PIPs and growth, 1-on-1s and meetings, and recognition. Five of the twelve HRMagix modules, reading from the same employee record as attendance and payroll, so a rating, a confirmation and an increment are the same history rather than three filing systems.
Read in order. Each stage explains what happens, and why that particular thing is worth doing rather than assumed.
Start of the year
The company objective is written first, and team and individual objectives are attached to it rather than drafted alongside it. That connection is the whole point of an OKR hierarchy: an individual can see which company outcome their key results roll into, and a leader can see which teams are carrying a given objective.
Key results are quantitative, which is what separates them from intentions. “Improve hiring” is not a key result; “reduce time-to-hire to 21 days” is, because progress against it can be read rather than argued.
Alongside the objectives
Key Result Areas are role-specific and comparatively stable. They describe what a person is accountable for by virtue of the job they hold, a payroll executive is accountable for an accurate monthly run whether or not that is anyone’s objective this quarter.
Keeping KRAs separate from OKRs prevents a common failure: an appraisal that rewards only the visible project work and ignores the recurring responsibility that kept the month running.
Through the year
Recurring one-to-ones hold a shared agenda and a record of action items, so the next conversation opens where the last one closed. This is the part of performance management that most often exists only in a manager’s notebook, and is therefore the part that disappears when the manager changes.
It also removes the worst property of an annual-only cycle: feedback arriving eleven months after the thing it concerns.
At review time
A review reads the objectives, the key results and the KRAs that were agreed at the start, which is what makes it a measurement rather than a recollection. Progress has been visible throughout, so the rating should surprise nobody in the room.
The 9-box then plots performance against potential on a single matrix. Its value is comparative: it shows where a team is dense and where it is thin, and which people are consistently strong but have never been given a stretch.
Where a review goes badly
A Performance Improvement Plan in HRMagix is a 30/60/90-day structure with milestones and a manager coaching log. The milestones are the substance: a plan with an end date and no interim checkpoints is a countdown, not an improvement plan.
The coaching log matters for two separate reasons. It is what makes the support offered easy to show if the outcome is later disputed, and it is what makes the plan developmental rather than procedural.
Continuously, not annually
Peer spot awards, value-based badges and a live culture wall are kept outside the review cycle. Recognition that waits for an appraisal is not recognition; it is a rating.
Because badges are tied to stated company values, the wall also becomes a quiet record of which values the organisation actually rewards, which is not always the list on the careers page.
Most disagreements about performance management are disagreements about vocabulary. These are the definitions the platform uses.
A qualitative statement of what you are trying to achieve in a period.
Written to be memorable, not measurable, the measurement is the key result.
A quantitative measure of progress toward an objective, with a target and a current value.
If it cannot move a number, it is a task rather than a key result.
A Key Result Area: an ongoing area of accountability attached to a role.
Stable across quarters. Changes when the job changes, not when the plan does.
A three-by-three matrix plotting demonstrated performance against assessed potential.
A comparative tool for a group. Reading a single person’s box in isolation tells you very little.
Comparing draft ratings across managers before they are finalised.
Exists because two managers rating the same work rarely reach the same number unaided.
A Performance Improvement Plan: a defined period with milestones, support and a decision at the end.
HRMagix structures it over 30/60/90 days with a coaching log against each milestone.
A recurring manager-report conversation with a shared agenda and tracked action items.
The agenda is shared, so it is not solely the manager’s meeting.
Peer-to-peer recognition given at the moment of the work rather than at a review.
Tied to a company value, which is what stops it becoming a popularity measure.
It does not set your rating scale, your review windows, your calibration rules, your promotion criteria or the length of a PIP. Those are the employer’s policy, and they are configured rather than supplied.
Nor does it score anybody automatically. Performance and potential are both human assessments recorded during a cycle. A talent matrix generated from data nobody assessed would look authoritative and mean nothing, which is a worse outcome than having no matrix at all.
Goals, reviews and growth plans.
The conversations and recognition that keep teams connected.
Mostly asked by HR leads part-way through designing a review cycle.
An OKR is time-bound and ambitious: it describes what you are trying to change this quarter. A KRA is continuous and role-bound: it describes what you are accountable for as long as you hold the job. Most appraisal disputes we hear about trace back to an organisation using one of the two where it needed both, measuring only the projects, or measuring only the routine.
No. The cycle length, the review windows, who participates in an assessment and how ratings are calibrated are the employer's decisions, configured as policy. The page above describes the rhythm a performance year commonly takes, not a schedule the platform imposes.
Visibility follows the same role permissions as the rest of the platform. Objectives are typically readable across a team so alignment is genuine rather than asserted, while ratings, review notes and PIP records stay with the employee, their manager and HR.
Performance comes from the ratings recorded in the review cycle. Potential is a manager assessment made during the same cycle. Neither is inferred by the platform, a talent matrix built from data the organisation never actually assessed would be a chart rather than a judgement.
The plan, its milestones and the coaching log are retained like any other employment record, because the point of the structure is that what was offered and what happened can both be shown later. That retention is what protects the employee as often as it protects the employer.
Growth. It carries payroll, performance, OKRs, KRAs and 9-box, recognition and analytics alongside everything in Starter. Starter covers attendance, leaves, the employee directory and documents.
Goal-completion trends and time since last review are among the signals HR analytics reads, and a confirmation or increment decision is recorded against the employee record rather than held separately. Nothing is re-keyed between the two, because both read the same record.
No. Performance and potential are both human assessments recorded during a review cycle; the platform does not generate ratings from data nobody assessed.
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