Microimage takes HR systems into millennial age

By David Ebert

Anyone who works in today’s corporate world has had to go through an employee performance evaluation. It is an essential process of validating an employee’s contribution and productivity in any organisation. However, it is a time-consuming process that eats up both the employee’s and the employer’s time.

The process entails the employee listing out what his or her goals are and having to quantify the same with their contributions in the previous year. This is an important method of calculating how much value an employee brings to the organisation through one’s own effort and dedication in achieving goals set out both by the employer and the employee’s personal goals in climbing the career ladder as well.

Microimage, a company that started out in 1993 as a college start-up by three individuals from the Ananda College, Computer Programming Club, churned out MS DOS based utility software, virus scanners, games and a series of Sinhalese language fonts for windows which were snatched up at a trade exhibition, bringing the young 19 year olds their first big sale.

From those humble beginnings, the company was set up to provide support services for the programs that they provided and now, 20 years later, has grown to be the country’s leading developer of HR software systems used by the country’s largest corporates ranging from the banking, apparel and IT sectors and now boasts a presence in nine countries throughout the Middle East and Asia.

Microimage CEO Harsha Purasinghe unveiled the company’s latest groundbreaking innovation recently; namely a social media-based performance management system called Workswiftly.com which promises to redefine the whole corporate employee performance evaluation process by melding social collaboration that links the employee and the top management in their day to day efforts and achievements.

The product allows employees and employers to create goals in line with the company’s corporate objectives, cascading through goal contribution coming from team members, instant feedback and giving them the opportunity to share their milestone achievements within the internal team structure in real-time. This allows the top management to monitor progress, offer real-time appreciation and encouragement and display the same among other employees within the network.

“We are absolutely delighted to introduce Workswiflty.com to change organisations towards modern, meaningful performance management systems by allowing people to work together in a fun environment whilst achieving their respective goals and objectives,” CEO Harsha Purasinghe stated at the launch event. “We work in a challenging environment and it is high time people started thinking differently when it comes to people’s performance management. Workswiftly.com offers a complete, collaborative social performance management, where a performance review process isn’t going to be an annual, bi-annual or quarterly affair but a regular exercise of the complete workforce,” he added.

Workswiftly.com is offered via cloud SaaS with complete mobile readiness when it goes live. The product is currently offered in Beta through an invite and the company believes that Workswiftly.com will transform the way people work and collaborate within an organisation by aligning people towards achieving superior performance.

The basis behind the program is simple, in that instant appreciation of an employee’s achievements by the top management will motivate employees to work better. This is in stark contrast to current evaluation methods for which feedback takes weeks to filter down to an employee, leaving them in virtual limbo, not knowing the outcome of the evaluation.

The system looks to change this by offering employees a social media network within an organisation inclusive of individual profile pages where they can display achievements by means of status updates where top management and colleagues can ‘like’ or offer encouragement through comments, update goal statuses, create project groups, delegate jobs to team mates and most importantly gives employers the ability to track progress in real time.

Expanding on the program’s plus points, Head of HCM Business Suren Rupasinghe said: “Our new social performance will become the flagship service of our entire HCM product portfolio. Apart from the new social service, some of our new analytics will help our customers extract timely and meaningful HR analytics without much pain.”

“With this year’s innovations, we can move from being a regional player to a global player, since Workswiftly.com is a completely cloud, mobile and social ready product which can be used to transform people’s performance management into the modern social era,” Rupasinghe added. Unveiled at HCM Connect 2013, the company’s flagship annual HR technology showcase held for the third consecutive year and themed ‘Experience a social evening’, Workswiftly.com looks to bring the HR sphere into the age of the ‘Millenials’.  

This year’s event was attended by local and international delegates, comprising of heads of HR, HR consultants, CIOs and CEOs of local corporates who were taken through a round of presentations by key executives of the company together with partners and customers.