Our HR software updates just in time for Christmas

It feels like only yesterday we were updating you with our summer software makeover, and now Christmas is just around the corner. The time has flown by for the citrus HR development team, who have polished off the year with some great HR software updates, including great performance management tools and pronoun and gender updates to name just a few!

We’re passionate about making all HR tasks easier and stress free, and believe HR should be simple for everyone, so we provide software tools to help small businesses do just that! Our latest updates should help simplify even more HR tasks in your small business.

Read about the latest updates, and much more, below.

Feedback for streamline Appraisals

We’ve completely rebuilt our powerful and effective Appraisals tool. Appraisals are one of the best tools you can use for performance management in your small business. We’ve added a much smoother process to help you objectively assess your staff and it now includes 360 degree feedback. It also makes it easy to track progress with your team’s goals.

You can still customise appraisals and have different questionnaires for different teams or times of year. When you and your people start the Appraisal process, the improved software has a new, much clearer menu so you can easily see what stage each appraisal has got to. This makes it obvious how to review or edit each stage of the Appraisal. You can request feedback from the appraisee’s colleagues to streamline your appraisal process and make the most of employee evaluations.

It’s also much easier to view progress made towards goals in the current appraisal period and to set new goals for the next. And you can print the appraisal summary if you want, too.

The main improvement is in ease of use, letting you look at past appraisals and helping you stay on top of which staff still need an appraisal. We hope the improved ease of use and the additional features will help you carry out thorough appraisals regularly – which should make a significant improvement to how engaged your staff feel, and how well they perform.

For more guidance on how to choose the best type of appraisal to carry out with your staff, click here.

The new One-to-one tool

This brand-new feature enables you to plan, record and track one-to-one’s. You can use our software to book one-to-one appointments for your team, and you can both provide some notes for discussion. One major advantage of using this software is that it keeps all the notes in one place where you can easily find them again—unlike using pads of paper or notebooks which get lost all too often. And it’s easy to review and update it with new thoughts. One of our most popular new features yet, this is a fabulous tool to record those important one-to-one conversations and help you manage your team.

Take a look at this to see it in action.

Sex, gender, and pronouns are live!

Our software now supports gender and pronoun preferences. People can add their preferred gender and pronouns to their personal profile. We know this can be highly sensitive, so we’ve included the ability for everyone who adds their preferences to choose whether the rest of their team can see their chosen pronouns on their personal profile. We’ve made it easy for employees to add more gender information at their discretion, for example trans-male, gender fluid, or any other gender identity they wish to identify as.

You and all your team can select pronouns of she/her, he/him, or they/them, so everyone in your company can present their identity the way they want to.

We have retained the sex field separately, as this is still needed for payroll reporting to HMRC. But we have added a setting to hide someone’s sex from being visible, so that everyone can identify within your business the way they want to rather than having to use just male or female.

Personalise new starter checklists

We know everyone loves a good checklist, and they can make our lives far easier. We’ve let customers customise their own New Starter Checklist for a long time – but in response to lots of requests, we have enhanced our software so you can now create and use different new starter checklists for different staff members! So if you want a very different process to onboard your sales people from the one you use for your development team and so on, you can now do that. Enjoy!

Personalising the onboarding process will do wonders for your new starter, as they feel more nurtured and tailored to as they enter your business. It’s hard enough to recruit and retain staff right now that small things often make the difference to whether someone new settles in quickly or not. We hope this can help you get new starters up and running, feeling engaged and performing well much faster than before.

How we can help

We’re always listening to customer feedback and improving our software. We have made hundreds of small improvements to our HR software for small business this year, as well as the larger updates mentioned above. And we’re already working on more ways to help you manage your people and saving you time.

The content of this blog is for general information only. Please don’t rely on it as legal or other professional advice as that is not what we intend.