Cornerstone Performance vs Small Improvements

Cornerstone is the best and most comprehensive solution that I have seen for talent management. I have used the LMS, Performance, Succession, Connect and Extended Enterprise modules. CSOD continues to make enhancements to their product, especially with Learning, Connect and Performance, but where they are lacking is in enhancements to their mobile app and to their Succession module. While I do find great value in reaching out to their Global Product Support team, it will sometimes take days and even weeks before you get a response from them on a case. The communication to the customer is lacking there. Additionally, I find that some of the modules, such as Performance and Succession, can be really complex and require a lot of testing and trial and error to get things right. It does help that you are given two test environments (Stage and Pilot) to test things in. The quarterly releases have also gotten better over time, with many resources that can be used throughout User Acceptance Testing and the rest of the release cycle. Change is not always handled seamlessly for the customer, as we have experienced major delays when our Account Manager was on leave and also our Client Success Manager was out on leave. The people who filled in for them seemed overwhelmed and as a result there was a lack of communication. The 360 Degree performance review functionality can be great if you make the initial time investment to set it up. The one thing that Cornerstone does not provide with their 360 functionality is benchmarking with other companies, which our HR decided they wanted to do and therefore went with a different vendor for 360 reviews. Overall, Cornerstone is a great encompassing talent management system and I have not encountered another company that comes close to what they offer.

- Heather R.

Our experience with Cornerstone has been rough to say the least. From our initial sales meetings and implementation there have been things that have just not gone as promoted. As a regulated medical device manufacturing company we have very specific expectations out of our LMS and Cornerstone claimed to be able to support those expectations and has fallen short in some areas. That being said, they have improved over the years and are much better with being transparent with us then in the past. We struggle with using a cloud based LMS for two reasons. One because our requested enhancements are usually denied or go into the black hole of a system that uses votes from other clients to assess other clients interests. As I mentioned we have very specific needs which aren't likely to receive a large number of votes. And second, when changes are pushed to our portal automatically we then have to retrain our global admins and users. It sometimes feels like you have to ask the same questions over and over to receive help. On the pro side I'd say the user interface is a big pro. The users seem to like the look and feel of cornerstone much better than our previous LMS. If we had to do it all over again would we cornerstone in the first place, maybe not, but as I mentioned previously there has been some improvement over the years and we will continue to voice our requests until it exceeds our requirements.

- Casey C.

I have configured Cornerstone for 2 years in my organisation and in these 2 years, our Performance Management strategy has continued to change every 6 months. The system has been sufficiently flexible to support the majority of these changes. Furthermore, the last few releases have seen a brilliant user interface redesign which our end-users have responded well to. You can have an amazing product that delivers from a functional standpoint, but if end users experience terrible UI and UX design in the system, then you are better off going back to pen and paper performance reviews. Thankfully, Cornerstone woke up and the last few releases saw a welcome improvement to UI and UX. Simple, clean and modern. Something to be wary of is the quarterly releases. I have seen great functionality released but have also experienced issues with the new functionality and existing functionality during regression testing, that seems to be the result of bad QA prior to deployment. This has previously caused great frustration for us. That being said, whenever the issue is escalated to our Client Success Manager, it would receive the appropriate attention by the engineers until its resolution.

- Nelson K.

I got our annual review process out to everyone within minutes. It's all online and there's no paperwork to deal with until you print the very final version and put them in the folders. The other neat thing is the "Praise" feature. Although I would like greater participation, I have it synched with Slack so that staff can put in almost no effort to praise their colleagues in such a way that it's recorded to their personnel files. That's awesome.

- Bailey K.

The idea of tracking 1:1 conversations and results from 360 degree reviews is good and the sharability is very serviceable.

- Justin W.

I use Small Improvements to manage the objectives of my software development team. I use the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method, which works pretty well with Small Improvements. I just list the key results in the description of the objective. The comments can then reference one of the key results. Originally we set the objectives semesterly, and they got lost amid the day-to-day work we do. We then changed to quarterly objectives, and that works much better. I work together with my employees to set the objectives, and they know pretty well what they need to accomplish throughout the quarter. It is important that the tool sends out emails to remind people of their objectives. I can really see how employees are working on the objectives throughout the quarter.

- Marc F.