Cornerstone Transforms Traditional Performance Management into Ongoing Conversations

Cornerstone OnDemand (NASDAQ: CSOD), a global leader in cloud-based learning, talent management and talent experience software, today announced Cornerstone Conversations, a new product that helps organizations foster higher levels of employee productivity, engagement and growth by driving regular, ongoing conversations among their teams.

Studies show that today’s employees, particularly millennials, prefer regular, continuous feedback from their leaders and peers in order to stay productive and engaged with their jobs.¹ As millennials will soon make up the majority of the workforce, today’s organizations are starting to realize the need to modernize their performance management approach.²

With Cornerstone Conversations, managers, employees and project team leaders can initiate a variety of ongoing conversations with anyone on their teams to ensure feedback is shared regularly. For example, they can use Conversations to facilitate:

• Weekly check-ins to discuss ongoing projects and provide coaching in the context of work
• One-on-one alignment sessions to foster collaboration among team members
• Quarterly performance reviews to track progress against longer-term goals
• Coaching conversations to provide individualized development and career development advice

Ongoing meetings can also be scheduled at any cadence, such as weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually, and every discussion is captured so either person can access their notes and feedback at any time.

Enabling More Effective One-on-One Discussions

Conversations is not only designed to elicit ongoing feedback, it is designed to facilitate productive and actionable coaching. To help managers and employees stay on course, Conversations includes meeting templates, called Conversation Templates, that provide topics based on management and coaching best practices. This includes Check-in Conversations, Coaching Conversations and Performance Review Conversations. Additionally, Conversations includes a "Create Your Own” feature so HR administrators can customize templates tailored to their organization’s needs.

Conversations also makes it easy to provide updates and feedback within the flow of work because it can be integrated with a variety of communication tools, such as Microsoft Outlook and Slack. Managers and employees can schedule daily or weekly digests to remain current on the discussion without having to log into Cornerstone and receive nudges reminding them that it’s time to schedule 1:1 meetings with their team members.

Driving Continual Development for a Better Employee Experience

Because Conversations is connected to Cornerstone’s other talent management products, it functions as a hub that merges ongoing talent development in an engaging and always-on way with longer-term development and performance goals. For example, within each meeting, managers and employees can quickly surface their goals, track their progress on a scale from 1-100 and make adjustments as their priorities shift – ensuring their goals are always top of mind.

Conversations also provides inline development opportunities to equip employees with Microlearning® course recommendations based on the employee’s role, goals and feedback. Recommended content is displayed within the Conversations home page, and employees can access the content without having to leave Conversations. Newer managers might see recommendations to take short, digestible content about how to be a better coach, or individual contributors might see recommended content about how to manage-up or improve their time management. Organizations can also take advantage of the vast array of content available through Content Anytime, Cornerstone’s content subscription service that features fresh, modern content, carefully curated from the world's leading learning providers.

Additional Information

Conversations is part of the Cornerstone Performance suite, a cloud-based performance management solution that supports people development and career progression, while capturing talent measurement data to surface performance metrics. Cornerstone Conversations will be available starting Fall 2019.

Comments on the News

"Today’s competitive market is requiring organizations to transform their performance management practices to better attract and engage top talent,” said Adam Miller, founder and CEO, Cornerstone. "With Conversations, organizations can ensure their employees get the continuous feedback and learning opportunities they want, while enabling better coaching from managers and higher performance from employees.”

About Cornerstone

Cornerstone was founded with a passion for empowering people through learning and a conviction that people should be your organization’s greatest competitive advantage. Cornerstone is a global human capital management leader with a core belief that companies thrive when they help their employees to realize their potential. Putting this belief into practice, Cornerstone offers solutions to help companies strategically manage and continuously develop their talent throughout the entire employee lifecycle. Featuring comprehensive recruiting, personalized learning, development-driven performance management, and holistic HR planning, Cornerstone’s human capital management platform is successfully used by more than 3,500 global clients of all sizes, spanning more than 42 million users across 192 countries and 43 languages. Learn more at www.cornerstoneondemand.com.

¹ Brandon Hall Group, DataNow® Snapshot: 2018 Performance Management Study, 2018
² Aegon Annual Report, 2018

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