Confirm offers 2 types of Development Plans, within which a variety of use cases and templates are possible: Standard Plans, and Employee-Driven Plans. Both are customizable for your organization using templates.
Please note that employees will be able to view both types of plans when the plan is Active.
Standard Plans
Standard Plans cannot be edited by the employee, but they are fully visible to the employee when in an Active status.
The most common type of Standard Plan is the Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), which is created by HR and the manager in order to help the employee course correct when needed.
However, any other use case, such as growth-oriented Development Plans, can work well as Standard Plans too! The key thing to remember is that when a plan isn’t an Employee-Driven Plan, the employee cannot edit the plan.
Employee-Driven Plans
By contrast, when Employee-Driven Plans are enabled, employees can create their own plans and collaborate on plans created for them!
This often works well for mentorship, cross-training, and other use cases in which collaboration and bi-directional feedback is important. They can also create a sense of ownership, since the employee can contribute directly to the plan.
A guide to Employee-Driven Development Plans especially written for employees is available here.
How to create Development Plans (Admins)
To create a new Development plan as an Administrator, navigate to Team > Development plans and click the blue Create development plan button. This will launch a pop-up with options for the plan. You’ll find your organization’s templates (see below for more details) in the dropdown menu for what kind of plan to create. Next, specify the employee the plan is for and their manager in the grey fields labelled for each. Assign a start date to the plan, and an end date if there is one (for example, a learning plan that will last 1 quarter). Click the blue Create development plan button on the pop-up, and your plan will be created as a plan in Draft status.
Once you have a Draft, you can add to the plan via text fields to add more detail. At any time, you can view what you have saved so far using the grey Review plan button next to the new plan’s entry in the list of plans. When you’re satisfied with its contents, you’re ready to change the plan’s status to Active by clicking on the plan’s blue Update status or add comments button, and then changing the status to Active in the dropdown:
Once the plan is active, it will become visible to the employee.
If the plan is Employee-Driven, then the employee will also be able to edit the plan at this point.
There is currently no way to prevent an Active plan from being visible to the employee, so please ensure the manager is ready to discuss the plan with the employee before changing the status to Active!
You can view all of your organizations’ active plans on the Development Plans dashboard in the Team menu, and filter your list of plans by employee or supporter as well as by status and progress indicator:
Templates
If there are certain types of plans that need to be used on a recurring basis, Confirm can add customized templates for your organization - please contact your Customer Success Manager to learn more.
When templates are added, they appear in the drop-down menu in the plan creation tool, reducing the time it takes to add new plans and ensuring that important information isn’t missed!