Evanscorp upgrades performance review application

The company, based in Wollongong, south of Sydney, released version 5.5 of Remunerate at a launch event yesterday.

Previous versions are already in use at some of Australia's largest firms, including Lend Lease, Transfield Services, Ausenco, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Stockland.

Some $3.5 billion of remuneration is said to have been managed by the tool over the last two years, the company said.

Evanscorp managing director Phil Evans said that, using the 80/20 rule, Remunerate focused on addressing the most detailed ‘20 per cent' of requirements when managing performance reviews, in addition to the common '80 per cent'.

"We all have employees, reviews and budgets to consider when going through remuneration processes," Evans said.

"This is the common 80 per cent. But do you weight groups in the organisation based on performance criteria, put negative loadings on one group because they aren't doing so well or have other loadings allocated against international assignees or star performers?

"This [level of detail] is the 20 per cent of most organisations' performance reviews. We think it's critical and Remunerate has always gone after that 20 percent, because without addressing it you can't properly manage your talent."

Evans said that a lot of HR departments currently use Excel spreadsheets to manage employee compensation.

"Excel is powerful but it has limitations," Evans said.

"No one uses more than 10 per cent of its capabilities, which makes sense because it's trying to meet everyone's needs. It has to be everyone's '20 per cent' so it's larger than it needs to be."

By contrast, Evans said that the code base for Remunerate continues to shrink while the tool becomes more powerful.

"5.5 is the smallest and most powerful version yet," Evans said.

The software also now supports not only multiple languages but a company's own HR lexicon, which can be added to the relevant data fields, he said.