Organisations who are experiencing issues with their people processes will often seek to use HR technology to address the problem. It may at the time seem to be an easy solution, but in fact ignores the underlying cause of the issue.

People often attribute a break down in the organisation's performance management process to cumbersome paperwork and lack of visibility of performance management information.

However, if the organisation doesn't address the real issues such as a lack of a culture of feedback in the organisation and leaders not doing enough of their day to day ‘people work', no system, no matter how good, will overcome this problem.  And when you try and introduce a new performance management system while at the same trying to drive new and more effective behaviours, people inevitably focus on the system at the expense of those behaviours.

Before implementing HR tech for any people process, first assess the current state of play in your organisation, diagnose the critical issues and then develop and implement a solution that will address those issues.  In most cases, you should focus first on the people, culture and behavioural aspects (e.g. giving and receiving regular feedback) and then introduce a system that may help facilitate and support those behaviours.

Michael Sleap is a freelance Organisational Development consultant, who up to a few years ago, thought that HR Tech involved using a spreadsheet really well.  You can find him on twitter @michaelsleap.