Whats New in MindKey™ HCM 3.3

Increased Focus on Specific Types of Discussions

Better support for formal and informal reporting structures is now available. If you always follow your formal reporting structure, you can lock the manager selection so that only the formal or secondary manager will participate in the discussion. Alternatively, you can indicate that you want to be able to freely choose from all employees in the organiation, which can be useful in a mentor or coach scenario.

Stronger connection between performance or development goals that are the subject of a discussion has been added. The new Close Goals check box enables a manager to close performance or development goals if appropriate, making it faster and easier for the manager to complete the process.

More control over who has access to what information about a discussion has been added to discussion types. The options available in Share Employee Ratings and Share Manager Ratings fields are more precise, and let you specify when employees and managers can see each others' ratings. You can also give participants access to ratings as soon as they are submitted, which enables participants to see a rating before submitting his or her own, or allow them to see the information only after both participants have submitted their ratings.

You can now specify whether an employee, manager, or secondary manager can provide final comments and ratings by selecting the check box for Final Comments and Final Rating on the Elements tab. Selecting the Secondary Manager check box also determines whether the secondary manager will receive notifications related to the discussion.

Sharper focus on the most important subjects of a discussion is made possible by weighting the importance of these items in relation to each other. If you are using advanced ratings, the Element Weights check box enables you to allow a manager to change the automatically calculated weight of like items included in a discussion. Similarly, the Skill Type Category Weights check box lets you define the importance of skill type categories to which the skill being evaluated or discussed belong. This can help clarify for managers and employees where they should concentrate their efforts.

Greater consistency in ratings is supported by the addition of the fields in the Discussion Rating Model field group, which let you assign a particular rating model to specific items a specific type of discussion. Formerly, these settings were made on the Parameters form, but moving them to the discussion types allows for more nuanced ratings.

Speedier process for creating discussions using the Discussion Wizard is facilitated by enabling the Instructions and Content screens only when this information is defined for the selected discussion type. If this information is not available, users no longer need to click through these screens (and wonder why they stopped in the first place).

Flexibility for Changing Unique Record Keys

Shorter methos for changing unique record keys, such as reassigning employee identification codes, when you need to. Unique record keys are used to relate one item in the system to other areas in the system. Previously, to avoid breaking links to other parts of the system, once a unique record key was saved it could not be edited. You can now rename unique record keys, and the change will update all parts of the system in which the key is used.

Identify the Best Candidates for a Second Interview

A quicker way to identify the most relevant candidates for a second interview is now available on the Candidates tab of the Vacancy form. The Interview field has been added, and is automatically selected if a decision was made earlier to interview the candidate. Odds are that if the person was interesting before, they’re probably still more interesting than other candidates who were not invited to an interview.

Alerts and Reminders with Report Subscriptions

Faster and increased awareness of changes to the employment status or employee base data is delivered by extensions to the notification and audit tools. You can subscribe to a report if you want to be notified whenever changes are made to an employee’s base data, or when a hire, movement, or separation action occurs. When a change occurs, reports highlight the changed information to make it easy for you to identify what information was changed.

Changes to Workflows and Notifications

More to-the-point information in notifications sent to employees makes it even easier for them to take appropriate action. In previous versions of MindKey HCM, the information shown on the General and Tracking Details tabs was more relevant for HR professionals. Therefore, this information is now only available to HR pros on the Started Workflows table on the Organization pane.

Quicker response times to released surveys is encouraged by the addition of the new Discussion Survey Completed workflow. When a manager completes a survey, for example, as part of a 360® Feedback Analysis, a notification is sent to the employee. To reduce the number of notifications sent back and forth, however, notifications are not sent when other contributors, such as co-workers, complete the survey.

Simpler View of Past and Current Employment Information

A clearer view to current or historic employment information for organization units and jobs is provided on the Employment tab of the Units and Jobs forms, which now display only information about who is working there right now. Historical employment information for units and jobs is available in the Employment By Unit and the Employment By Job reports (see New Additions to the Report Gallery).

Additions to the Report Gallery

The Reports gallery is growing and improving its output in each new release of MindKey™ HCM. Several interesting new reports are added, and some valuable improvements have been made to reports from earlier product releases. The following list describes these new additions and the changes made to existing reports:

Employment By Unit and the Employment By Job reports now give you the option to filter report results when you want to see only past employment information.

The Proof of Identity report now includes employee IDs in a column preceding the employee name.

The Employee Goals report shows a list of goals for a selected employee.

The Unit Skills By Job report shows horizontally the jobs that are associated with a selected department, and vertically the actual skills that are requirements for the job.

The Survey Design report lets you preview the appearance of a survey before distributing it.

Report Subscriptions enable an administrator to subscribe users to receive an alert whenever changes are made to an employee's base data, or when a hire, movement, or separation action occurs. The subscriptions available are the Employee Change Subscription, Employee Hire Subscription, Employee Move Subscription, and the Employee Terminate Subscription.

The Discussion Preparation report is renamed to Discussion Rating and now offers final rating and final comment information from the employee, manager, and secondary manager. Final rating and comment information was previously available in the Discussion Outcome report.

The Discussion Outcome report is now truer to its name, and shows only skills that were updated and goals that were closed directly from the discussion (requires that the Update Skills and Close Goals parameters are enabled on the related discussion type).

The External CV report can now also include employee hobbies.

Managing Information about Training Courses

Stronger tools for managing information about courses held by a third party provider have been added to the course management functionality. If your training course provider manages training information, such as content and schedules, a MindKey representative can now help you import this information to your MindKey HCM database from the provider. This gives you faster access to information about the training activities.

The new External Course Administration check box lets you enable users to preview information about courses that have been imported from a third party provider, but prevent them from editing it in the table, form, or by using the options on the Actions menu. The one exception to this is the process of registering new participants. This action is always available, regardless of whether external course administration is enabled.

Better support for courses for which an exact schedule is unknown is provided by the ability to schedule a course and register participants without giving a start and end date for the course. This can be valuable when, for example, you don’t have enough participants for the course to be cost effective right now but you expect interest to increase. You can assign dates to the course later using the Reschedule the course option on the Actions menu. This will also initiate the course related workflows and send notifications to registered participants.

More comprehensive overview of employee training and automatic transferal of completed training to employee resumes is now available. Using the Task Pane to add the new Courses tab to the Employee form can give you a complete picture of all past, current, and future training courses in which the employee has or will participate. Additionally, when a course status is set to completed, you can now specify that the system should transfer relevant information about the course to the resumes of all registered participants.

Longer, non-unique course descriptions now let you add more detail about courses in your course catalogue. Previously, you were limited to using 50 characters in a course description. This is now doubled to 100, which offers you more flexibility when describing the content or purpose of the course.

E-Mail Communication with Candidates for a Vacancy

An easier method for communicating with one or more candidates for a vacancy by using e-mail can now save you time when you want to send the same information to each candidate. This new functionality builds on the integration with mail merge features in Microsoft Word. You’re now able to quickly pick from a list the specific candidates to whom you want to send an e-mail message.

Copying Information Between Job Types

A smoother process for setting up job types, which are building block setups for jobs, is available. When creating a new job type, you can now save time by copying information about skills that are assigned to a similar job type. After you copy the skills information, you can then edit it to suit the new job type.

More than One Instance of MindKey Notification Service

Broader flexibility for setting up and working with notifications is offered by the ability to run more than one instance of the MindKey Notification Service on a single computer. This is useful when, for example, when testing the appearance of notifications. You can now test notifications without disturbing the appearance of those on your production machine.

Viewing Current Job Responsibilities

Sharper understanding of the items, actions, or areas for which a person is responsible in his or her job is now readily accessible to employees on the Current Job Responsibilities form on the Employees pane. This information was previously available only on jobs, which meant that only HR professionals could view it. Now, employees can freely refer to the information.

Changes to Surveys

Clearer terminology has been applied by renaming the Survey form to Survey Design. In earlier versions of MindKey HCM, the form used to set up the various components of a survey, and the assembled survey itself, were both called “survey”. This is changed to help avoid confusion when referencing survey setups and the final survey that is ready to distribute to respondents.

Better opportunity for using scoring on surveys has been added to response options. You can now designate the correct response option in an option group by selecting the Correct Answer check box on the Response Options form