This month we added brand new features to better engage your workforce.

We are excited to announce a whole new performance management experience to the Flex Engage platform! This new Performance Management experience covers many of the most requested features to run a seamless and easy performance process. This new module also directly integrates with our new succession planning tool.

Our new performance system all is built on a new and improved question bank. This new bank includes new options to assign questions categories as well as set rules when users respond.

Rules are a great opportunity to force comment responses depending on how employees respond to questions. A good example to take advantage of this would be if you were to ask a 1-5 scale question, you are now able to force comment responses if the user selects a 1 or a 5 but not require further comments if they were to select between 2-4. These new rules apply to scale, star rating, and multiple choice questions.

Categories can be added to any type of questions. These give admins an ability to group questions together under a common theme and then report on them later.

The new template builder aims to create a more user friendly and improved experience when creating a performance review template. This new template builder also supports an easier drag and drop experience to quickly adjust where certain elements should be in your template.

While we previously supported the ability to review goals inside of your review, you are now able to customize where in the template this happens. You can also now decide the name of the question as well as if it is displayed as either a scale question or scale question.

One of the most requested features we have had recently is now available with the introduction of the ability to create goals as a user from directly within the review process.

By pulling in the goal creation option, when users reach that point in the template, they will be asked to create a certain number of goals decided upon when launching the review in the cycle creation wizard.

With the addition of our succession planning career matrixes, the competency review process has never been easier. After creating your career tracks and linking employee positions to them. When filling out a review, reviewers will now not only see the competency, but also see the description underneath that is associated with their job level to clarify expectation when reviewers have employees in different career levels.

One of the largest improvements with our new performance management module is the inclusion of a new and improved peer reviewer (contributor) flow. Now, there can be a dedicated period of time where employees or managers can nominate who they want to complete their reviews and managers can approve/override their requests. They are also able to just give managers the option to decide for their employees reporting to them. The number of peers is now decided upon in the cycle wizard.

Performance reviews will now have the option to be approved by Managers, Manager's Manager, and even by you the admin. If approval flows are selected, before they can be marked as complete and shared, they will need to be approved. If someone in the approval flow disagrees with the submission, they can now provide the specific feedback on the question(s) they would like revised that will be visible to the employee when it is returned to them to work on.

Admins now have the option to allow managers the ability to either directly, or request to delegate their manager review to someone else in the company.

Overrides will now give admins the option to carve out groups of employees who may skip certain processes or complete a template different than others in the cycle.

This aims to ensure you don't need to create separate cycles for each edge case you may have in your review flow and keep things easier and consolidate your date to be easy to read.

Scores are now able to be shown in the following formats:

* No Matter what score measurement is decided, Admins will remain able to view performance review scores on a 0-100% basis as well as the score measurement selected.

Admins will now be able to configure each step of the review process directly on a drag and drop calendar view. You are now able to decide the time that each review opens and closes in addition to the day they become active. The notification is also now fully custom. While scheduling your review flow you can also enter custom notifications with specific text anywhere in the review flow you would like to ensure people stay on task.

During the actual review flow, you will have full ability to extend timelines and give users more time. Also, if the review cycle closes after its been completed, you will now be able to re-open it just for specific people and have them make changes without re-opening the whole cycle for everyone in the company.

Performance Review Admins will now not only have access to the standard aggregate review results but also a full report builder.

You now have the option to get question, category, or score data and compare across multiple cycles rather than being stuck reporting on just a single cycle at a time.

The great part is you can save these reports and come back to them anytime if you need to reference them again.

We allow users to display their data as either bar charts, scatter plots (when comparing only 2 data elements), and a full data grid view.

With this latest release we have made our first step into offering a Succession Planning solution for our users. This also aims to provide a solution to employers and employees to more easily visualize their career paths in front of them and the necessary skills required to continue to develop.

Admins are now able to create career paths for each of their job functions that exist in their business. Within each track, we separate out the path into an Individual Contributor and Manager tracks.

Within each Sub-Path admins are able to either create job levels or use Generative AI to create highly specific and relevant job levels based on the Function and if its the Individual Contributor or Manager Paths.

After creating the job levels and linking them to positions that exist within Flex, you can once again either create or use AI to generate competencies that are the most relevant to the path you are creating.

Lastly, you can quickly make the whole Competency Matrix by using AI and generating the entire matrix at once or by individually using AI for each cell in the matrix. This new feature allows admins to create specific career tracks and competency matrix for their employees without spending hours for each role while also empowering employees with knowledge on how they can continue to develop.

Paychex Flex Engage now supports additional guidance types that more closely match base pay flows. If you choose to include Bonuses in your compensation cycles, you are now able to provide guidance based on their tenure in the company as well as their Salary range.

A new permission group has been created that allows you to assign certain employees the ability to view compensation data and create compensation cycles but is limited to the displayID that they are a part of.

Whenever a compensation cycle is completed now, there is a record that can be viewed that shows the user who completed the cycle, their name, email, and their IP Address.

Rewards admins are now able to not only get the employee name and email but also their Flex Employee ID and their Display ID included in the report. This way, if you operate in a multi-ID scenario, you will be able to tie rewards spend back to the specific business line.

When impersonating a user, you will now be unable to view the manage compensation tab on the left hand menu as well as the manage permissions as an added security restriction.

Employees are now able to clock in and clock out directly from inside of the Flex Engage platform. Currently, the actual time clock functions are the only pieces integrated into flex Engage. To configure this you will want to work with your dedicated Client success Partner to add this to the engage platform.

After receiving survey submissions, Admins are now able to have AI summarize their survey responses as well as give a general overview of the entire survey and the responses. This makes it much easier to identify problem areas or areas of excellence to lean into.

This is available for all survey question types except for file upload and employee selection.

We are currently working on the following new features and are excited to make them available to you in our next major release!

Paychex Flex Engage will introduce a feature that will allow direct messaging, group messages, and channels.

Forms will be a new feature that will allow employees or managers to submit forms that can be approved, audited and tracked by employees and admins. These can be used for progressive discipline as well as other uses.

Anniversary reviews will be added to the new performance management experience.