What is Calibration?
Calibration is a process used to appraise employee performance in a fair and consistent manner. Managers meet in calibration sessions to discuss employee performance and achieve agreement on performance ratings. At the onset of a calibration session, the definition of each performance rating can be agreed upon to enable a common language to use when discussing and evaluating performance. The intent is to help eliminate any potential manager bias when discussing employee performance and finalizing ratings.
SAP SuccessFactors Calibration provides a framework to objectively evaluate employee performance. This tool provides HR and senior managers the means to impartially review and adjust performance ratings across teams, departments and the organization. A calibration session provides a visual presentation of employee data from multiple sources in multiple views. Evaluating ratings in several formats with different filters may help to find areas of bias.
Calibration may be a standalone process or part of a performance review process, a talent review process, or a compensation review process.
Information used within Calibration may be sourced from Performance Management, People Profile, Compensation, or Succession data. Within Performance Management, overall performance, potential, competency, and goal ratings may be calibrated. The Succession related metrics that may be calibrated are Risk of Loss, Impact of Loss and Reason for Leaving. Compensation ratios may be evaluated using the salary, bonus, stock and variable pay components of a compensation template. Overall potential, performance, competency, objective and two custom ratings may be calibrated from the talent profile section of People Profile. Upon completion of a calibration session, ratings are updated in the original source.
We will focus on calibration based on ratings from a performance form template.
Basic Configuration of Calibration
There are several steps to perform before we are ready to run a calibration session:
- Enable Calibration in Provisioning
- Configure Succession Data Model
- Set role-based permission for Calibration access
- Configure data source template
- Enable calibration related e-mail notifications
- Configure Calibration Template
- Configure Calibration Settings
- Assign users to Executive Review role
- Configure Calibration History Portlet in People Profile
In this blog we will cover the steps to configure Calibration in Provisioning. The steps to configure Calibration in your instance will be covered in the next blog, “Configuring SAP SuccessFactors Calibration Part II – Instance Set Up”.
Enable Calibration in Provisioning
First we must enable Calibration in Provisioning. Within Company Settings, search for “Calibration” to find the section called Enable Calibration. Once found, click the checkbox as seen below.
Additional settings under Enable Calibration may be enabled here. If you plan on using Executive Review, which summarizes calibration activity across sessions, enable this feature here. We will need this feature enabled when creating the calibration template.
If you are going to permit managers to create their own calibration session, click the checkbox for “Enable Manager Calibration Session”. We will need this feature when configuring the calibration settings.
The other features may be set in the instance directly via Manage Calibration Settings and will then reflect as enabled in Provisioning. We will be discussing these features in the next blog, so we can leave the rest unchecked here.
There is also a radio button within Enable Calibration used to identify the permission model used. The default permission model is legacy permissions but you should be using Role-Based Permissions (RBP). Make sure “Use role based permission model”is selected.
Save the settings in this section of Company Settings before moving on to the next set of features to enable.
Calibration Reporting Permission
There are no standard reports or dashboards for calibration. Any calibration reporting will need to be done using ad hoc reports. If you wish to make calibration data available for reporting, go to the Analytics and Dashboard Tabs & Misc Reporting section of Company Settings.
“Additional Adhoc Sub domain Schemas Configuration” and “Enable INCLUDE STARTING FROM USER in people pill” will need to have the following enabled:
- Calibration
- Calibration Org Chart Coverage
- Calibration Activity
After saving the settings, back out of Company Settings and we will continue with additional configuration set up.
Configuring Calibration in the Succession Data Model
There are elements in the Succession Data Model that can be used for calibration. We will need to update the data model to ensure these elements are configured. Export the data model in order to make updates.
Open the file using an XML editor. Here we will be updating the following:
- Rating elements
- Display options
- Filter options
- Calibration History Portlet
We will look at each of these.
Rating Elements
The ratings that can be calibrated are based on the available ratings configured in your system. While setting up Calibration in your instance, you identify the data source of the ratings. Earlier we had mentioned that ratings may come from performance form templates. You may calibrate ratings from an existing performance form template or you may decide to create a new performance form template in order to utilize additional rating types such as overall competency, overall goal and overall potential.
In either case, the data model must contain the rating elements that you wish to calibrate. Most likely these already are already in the data model but you will need to verify this. The rating elements are:
- sysOverallObjective
- sysOverallCompetency
- sysOverallPerformance
- sysOverallPotential
- sysOverallCustom01
- sysOverallCustom02
A code segment seen below displays an example of the overall performance rating background element.
Make sure all of the rating types that you wish to calibrate are included in your data model.
Additional Elements to Calibrate
There are three standard elements that may display in some of the views in a calibration session. If you are using SAP SuccessFactors Succession, these most likely are in used for Talent Flags and Matrix Grid reports.
- riskOfLoss
- impactOfLoss
- reasonForLeaving
A code sample of the flags is shown below:
Display Options
Calibration sessions can display data in many views. In Part II of this series, you will learn how to create these views. There is a display option feature that is particularly useful for the List view tab. Here the data is displayed in a table with a row for each employee being calibrated. If there are several columns for this table, there could be a lot of back and forth scrolling. With the display option feature, some columns may be hidden. There is an icon for display options that enables users to add or remove certain columns from the view. Some are hardcoded and will always show up as display options in a calibration session:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Count
- Quickcard (if enabled in the calibration template)
The Quick Card display option may be enabled when configuring the Calibration template which we will discuss in Part II.
When clicking on the display options icon within the calibration session, any of these fields may be deselected and those columns will no longer display on the view.
There are some icons that may be added as a display option fields. Any display option fields defined for Succession in the Matrix Grid Classifier tool in Provisioning or the flags be set in Matrix Grid Report Icon Reconfiguration may also be used as display options in a calibration session. In the list view, any of these icons selected would appear in a new column called “Attributes”. Bin and matrix views the icons appear underneath an employee’s name. Having these icons readily visible for each employee may be useful when comparing employees.
Filter Options
Filter Options are used in a calibration session to narrow the list of the employees that display. If there are a large number of subjects, this is a way to view a smaller group that meet the filter criteria. It may be more manageable to view subsets of employees during the session.
Within a calibration session, the standard fields that are available as filter options are:
- Manager
- Division
- Department
- Location
- Jobcode
These will always appear as filter fields for a calibration session. If Risk of Loss, Impact of Loss and Reason for Leaving are also in your data model, these fields will also be filter fields. The 15 custom fields that may be defined in the data model may also be added as filter options. To set this up, the custom fields must be part of the default filter in the data model as shown below in the code segment sample.
These custom fields may also be used in as filters in calibration. Module specific filters are defined within <custom-filters>. Identify the calibration module filters by adding this tag:
<filter-module-id=”calibration”>
Include the custom elements that you wish to use as calibration filters. This should be placed after the default filter as shown below:
There is one additional calibration specific element that may be added to the data model. We will look at this next.
Calibration History Portlet
Calibration data may appear in People Profile when the Calibration History Portlet is configured. This portlet provides a snapshot of calibration session data along with ratings. The background element for the portlet must be added to the data model. A code segment sample is shown below.
<background-element id="calibrationHistoryPortlet" type-id="138"> <label>Calibration History Portlet</label> </background-element>
If you also wish to use the portlet in the Employee Scorecard, the portlet must be added under the view-template “employeeScorecard”. A code segment sample is shown below.
After making the data model updates, save and import the data model.
Congratulations! Calibration is now enabled and you are ready to set up Calibration in your instance. Coming soon will be my blog, Configuring SAP SuccessFactors Calibration Part II – Instance Set Up to learn how.
For more information about Calibration and other talent management modules in SAP SuccessFactors, check out our book here!
Do you need help setting up your Calibration implementation? Contact us at: info@worklogix.com
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