# Sombra Cuts Review Cycle Setup To Less Than 1 Hour

[**Sombra**](https://sombrainc.com/) 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.

## Peoplelogic saves me time

With Peoplelogic, 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; Peoplelogic is like a game for them.

### Nataliia Shulzhenko  
Resource Manager

## Story

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 Needed To:

- **Fully automate 360 reviews and goal-setting activities.**
- **Allow customization to fit the company’s performance management workflow.**
- **Simplify the evaluation process and ensure transparency.**

## The Challenge

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 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 to:

- ensure seamless participation among employees.
- deliver appraisal forms to the right recipients.
- ensure a timely response from participants.

As challenges piled up, Sombra realized that they needed to pivot from manual HR tools to an automated solution. Sombra hoped to resolve missed emails and repetitive follow-ups for evaluation form fill-ups.

## The Solution

While Sombra had precise requirements for a performance management system in place, few providers could satisfy them.

Their quest for a fully automated and customizable solution eventually led them to Peoplelogic. Once they were informed of Peoplelogic’s features, Sombra signed up for a trial.

Sombra proceeded to set up Peoplelogic for performance review by the following steps:

1. Create the first cycle with a pilot group.
2. Set up company templates and performance evaluation questions.
3. Customize the personal development plan template.
4. Send all participants an announcement about Peoplelogic, and how the new process works with screenshots of it from Peoplelogic, and why they do it.

## The Implementation

Peoplelogic allows Sombra to manage performance appraisal differently. It has lifted the burden of:

- managing feedback on spreadsheets for all employees.
- granting access rights.
- inserting feedback from multiple sources, including emails and Google forms.

**Sombra has simplified its employee appraisal process to the following steps:**

1. The HR spends 1 hour monthly to set up a review cycle. With the pre-configured templates, HR managers only need to determine the participants.
2. They use a single dashboard to monitor cycle progress, send friendly reminders, and share appraisal results with the participants.
3. Then, HR managers hold performance reviews with the employees and supervisors to discuss feedback and set goals for subsequent evaluations.
4. Managers ensure that all employees have a personal development plan and monitor their progress.
5. Sombra upholds the culture of continuous feedback by scheduling 1:1 meetings between managers and employees. This takes place continuously before the performance review meeting.

Peoplelogic 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. Peoplelogic is intuitive, so we didn’t spend much time educating employees about it.

### Svitlana Aksyonova  
HR Business Partner

## Driving Results For Sombra

In Closing

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.