Sombra is a Ukrainian software company that grew rapidly in the toughest time. Despite wartime challenges, the company’s employees increased by 56% over the past 2 years and they were named one of Clutch’s top software development companies in 2022.
Sombra's HR team was overwhelmed by the workload of planning, implementing, and reviewing employee feedback, and was seeking a solution to automate and simplify performance management processes.
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Pro Monthly
255 employees
Ukraine
Software Development & Consulting services
With Plai, managing performance is faster, easier, and less stressful. It helps us gather feedback and organize review cycles without hundreds of forms and sheets. Employees started to fill out reviews faster, Plai is like a game for them.
Despite its growing momentum, Sombra remains committed to delivering high-quality services and maintaining a high-performance team.
To do that, Sombra conducts continuous feedback and performance evaluation for their employees. This allows their employees to be more productive as individuals and teams. Sombra uses the continuous feedback framework alongside bi-annual 360 reviews. This allows HR to gather feedback from several parties, including managers, peers, subordinates, customers, and the employee themselves. The HR manager gathers the feedback and shares it with the manager and employee. Then, they discuss it at the meeting, and the employee sets personal development goals.
Sombra’s performance management approach was pivotal in driving its growth in the early stages. It received positive responses from its employees, with approximately 90% active participants in review cycles monthly. However, Sombra’s discovered the limitations of conventional tools when more employees joined the organization. In time, Sombra’s HR team was overwhelmed by the workload of planning, implementing, and reviewing employee feedback. Tools like emails, Google forms, and Excel struggled toÂ
As challenges piled up, Sombra realized that they needed to pivot from manual HR tools to automated solution. Sombra hopes resolved missed emails and repetitive follow-ups for evaluation form fill-ups.
While Sombra had precise requirements for performance management system in place, few providers could satisfy them.
Their quest for a fully automated and customizable solution eventually led them to Plai. Once they were informed of Plai’s features, Sombra signed up for a trial.
Sombra proceeded to set up Plai for performance review by the following steps.Â
Resource Manager
“Most of the platforms we reviewed weren’t flexible and were limited by non-customizable built-in templates. This will force us to change our process to fit the system, which we didn’t want to do. It was important for us to find a solution that fits our process, not change the process to fit the solution.”
HRÂ Business Partner
"It's cool that Plai doesn't put you in a box; it's very flexible. You can customize questions, roles, and everything you need in the cycle. We noted this as an advantage."
Plai allows Sombra to manage performance appraisal differently. It has lifted the burden of:
Sombra has simplified its employee appraisal process to the following steps:
HRÂ Business Partner
It’s very easy to navigate around Plai: for example, we started to use the People & teams modules, set up the hierarchy of team roles, and streamlined the creation of the review cycle.
Sombra has achieved a feat that many companies struggle with. Within a short period, they migrated from a conventional performance management system to one capable of automating continuous feedback. As a result, Sombra is maintaining consistency throughout different review cycles. Every part of the review process is also transparent for the employees.Â
Resource Manager
"I saw that system works great with our process and it really saves me time. With Plai, employees started to fill out review forms faster, it’s more interesting to do than in online forms, it is like a game for them."
HRÂ Business Partner
"Plai is very convenient to use, which really makes the life of HR managers easier. It facilitates system adoption by employees; if the tool is hard, it may remove all the desire to participate in the process. Play is intuitive, so we didn’t spend much time educating employees about it."
Plai received a score of 99% in customer satisfaction from G2 users, the highest for Objectives and Key results & Performance software.
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