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Agile performance management, which began in Silicon Valley, is now becoming mainstream in Korean companies as well. Each organization adopts it in different forms depending on its strategy, environment, maturity, and change management capacity, but the broad direction shares consistent common ground: cutting cumbersome and unnecessary procedures to a minimum and focusing on improving future performance rather than calculating past scores and grades.
Choi Hyo-jin, Senior Vice President at HCG (Human Consulting Group) — one of Korea's premier HR-specialist firms — puts it this way: "The essence of performance management is about 'what we need to do going forward to create better results.' The focus should be on supporting and encouraging every employee to give each other feedback in the pursuit of performance improvement and growth." She adds, "Introducing a solution that supports employees in leading their own performance management and feedback, and that drives continuous engagement, is no longer a matter of choice."
Let's take a closer look at HCG's "Performance Plus," which has drawn significant attention by turning a role model for agile performance management into an actual service.
HCG is an HR-specialist firm — the only HR Total Solution Provider in Korea that covers every area of the HR value chain, including HR consulting, HR solutions, cloud services, and payroll outsourcing.
HCG's solutions span the full HR landscape — organization, personnel, attendance, payroll, recruiting — with tailored packages by company size.
At the enterprise tier, hunel covers the scale and performance needs of large conglomerates, financial institutions, and the public sector. JaDE is a solution optimized for mid-sized and strong small-to-medium enterprises. Both hunel and JaDE hold commanding market share in their respective segments.
Performance Plus is "an OKR-based agile performance management and collaboration platform." It offers all the best-practice features of performance management and agile organizational operations: OKRs (Objectives & Key Results), real-time feedback, 360 feedback, 1:1 meetings, review and talent snapshots — and it integrates work boards and Scrum for collaboration into the performance management platform. It also still provides the traditional evaluation features — summing performance and capability scores and distributing grades — making it a flexible performance management platform that can be used by most Korean companies regardless of where they are on their journey into agile performance management. Going forward, it will evolve into an "HR-data-driven people analytics and prediction platform" that delivers services like job-fit talent recommendations, engagement analysis, and performance impact analysis — grounded in HR and performance management data.
If we had to pick keywords, they would be Agile, Decouple, and Casual. Agile emerged as a management keyword from the 2010s. At first, the level of interest was "wouldn't it be nice to do this?" Recently, it has become a survival essential — "we have to do this."
Another major shift is "Decoupling" — no longer tying evaluation results directly to rewards. When evaluation ratings were mechanically fed into rewards, employees would avoid setting ambitious goals. And because performance management and evaluation were being run with rewards and promotions already in mind, there was a side effect of retrofitting the performance-management-and-evaluation process to fit reward and promotion decisions. A growing number of companies are separating rewards from performance management and evaluation, so that the latter can stay true to its original purpose: performance improvement and growth.
In that context, there is a lively conversation about how rewards should be decided going forward.
"Casual" operates in the same spirit as Decoupling. It is the shift toward not being bound by the formal procedures and rituals that come with compensation — being flexible about any approach, as long as it achieves the goal of "how do we improve performance and grow?"
Performance Plus is the concrete service-form realization of HCG's own performance management consulting experience and insights. It does not just turn individual performance management features into a service — it embeds HCG's thinking and conclusions around the fundamental questions of performance management: "Who is top talent?", "What are the drivers of performance?", "How do we spread them?"
The core of performance management is feedback from leaders and peers. A platform has to allow "anyone," "instantly when needed," and "based on value and facts" to give feedback.
And it should also allow people to request it, so that feedback continues to be drawn out.
Feedback that carries the live context and background of goals and work can be sent directly in the flow. Beyond mounting work boards and Scrum on the platform itself, Performance Plus integrates with major collaboration tools so that users can give feedback and manage performance directly inside Google, Teams, Slack, WebEx, and Kakao Work — without having to move over to Performance Plus itself. This has been a highly praised feature from a usability standpoint.
We have also introduced a variety of tools and mechanisms to analyze feedback data and help good feedback spread naturally. Badges and appreciation gifts draw out natural strengths-based feedback, while data analysis and visualization help feedback be shared and reviewed systematically.
The platform encourages employees to stay continuously engaged in performance management activities. HR practitioners can monitor every performance management activity through manager tools. If goal management activities are sparse, if a manager's review or feedback is delayed, if a 360 feedback deadline is looming, or if it has been a long time since a 1:1 meeting was held, the platform sends notifications through any channel — web, mobile app, collaboration tools, email.
In short, the ultimate form of agile performance management is employees leading their own goal management and feedback, HR practitioners monitoring it all in real time, and the platform sending automated notifications — and Performance Plus has every one of these capabilities.
Company A creates goals on the fly whenever a new task arises, and when a goal is closed, the platform automatically generates peer and manager reviews.
At year-end, those review results are summarized and delivered as analysis and visualization data so the evaluator can take it all in at a glance — enabling agile, data-driven evaluation.
Company B runs 360 feedback across its employees on a variety of themes. Beyond performance, it collects feedback from multiple angles — how someone works, onboarding for new hires, leadership capability diagnostics, growth potential diagnostics — and uses that data to analyze and predict the factors that drive top performance.
As for actual employee reactions, some of the most memorable comments have been: "Looking at the feedback a high-performing colleague received gave me a real lesson in how to earn recognition going forward," and "Because we give and receive feedback as needed, I've been able to grow much faster, and since my year-end evaluation is grounded in that feedback, I can really accept the result."
Because we work with so many clients, we get to see each one's change journey and results. The key factor is how well change management is done.
Every client we work with agrees on the need for and direction of a shift toward agile performance management, but many of them voice how difficult change management itself is.
You have to keep communicating the "why" and the "how" with employees. The "what" — what specifically to change — can be approached in stages.
For example, if the evaluation method is hard to change all at once, start by letting people set goals in a more flexible way.
The role of leaders is especially important in this process. For leaders, you need to keep delivering programs that build alignment on the need for and direction of change, along with capabilities in goal setting and giving feedback. Embedding change management programs as a service inside Performance Plus is one of our major goals for next year.
More than anything, self-direction is key. Employees have to step forward, clearly define their own role and the expectations placed on them, and set goals accordingly.
As they work toward those goals, they need to continuously ask their supervisors and colleagues for feedback on what they are doing well and where they could improve.
In agile performance management, I want to emphasize that self-directed employees are the ones who deliver results and grow.
Since our founding in 2001, we have identified and solved countless HR and organizational issues for our clients. More than two decades of experience and know-how are our defining competitive strength, and Performance Plus is only the first HR SaaS in which we have turned that experience and know-how into service form — it is just the beginning. From here, we will expand into the broader realm of strategic HR — strategic compensation decisioning, strengthening employee experience and engagement, and more — all delivered as services.
Beyond that, our top goal and challenge is to release a Total HR SaaS platform that also folds in the experience and know-how of our hunel and JaDE solutions — covering both HR operations and HR strategy in a single whole.