14th October 2025 5 MIN READ
This week marks an important milestone in our growth at Talos360. When I joined four years ago, there wasn’t a consistent approach to how we helped our people grow, from setting meaningful goals to supporting development and encouraging open, constructive one-to-ones.
Having built strong foundations to support our people, we’re now ready to take the next step, moving to a digital process that will elevate how we manage performance, career growth, and succession. The launch of Appraisd marks a key milestone in that journey for Talos360.
What is Appraisd?
Appraisd by Talos360 is a performance management platform that is now part of the Talos360 family. So, it’s the ideal choice for us, not only to test out our own product! But because we know that our team is the driver of our future success and that people here want more development and clearer career paths.
We’ve already demonstrated our commitment to supporting our people through the development of an objective setting and appraisal process, career development workshops and personal development plans (PDPs), however, without a system that gives us visibility of performance, potential, and ambition across the business, it can be challenging to track our teams performance and provide them with the opportunities they are looking for.
Where we’ve come from
Four years ago, things were very different. My priorities when I started at Talos360 were to get a regular review process in place with objectives, annual reviews, mid-year reviews and PDPs so that people could map out their two-three-and five-year goals.
Of course, it wasn’t all plain sailing and it’s been a journey with some line managers to help them see the value of regular performance conversations – not just for them but for their team members who might not ask for a one-to-one but really value it when they do have it!
Plus, like many HR leaders it’s not easy to get 100% completion of reviews and although we do have a very strong completion rate, I’d like to see everyone having clear objectives and a regular review with their manager. The process isn’t simple from the HR side either with manual processes and uploading completed forms to our HRIS, taking up more of my time than it should!
This process has served us well until now, but I’m excited about the future and how Appraisd is going to provide a whole new level of insight about our people.
What’s next for Talos360
So, as of October we’re ditching the Word documents! And launching Appraisd with objectives, appraisals, PDPs, one-to-ones, wellbeing check-ins, onboarding reviews and exit interviews. I think this will be a hugely beneficial change for everyone at Talos360 whether you’re a colleague, line manager, senior leadership team member or just starting out at Talos360.
Plus, in the near future, once everyone is comfortable with the system, we will introduce 360 feedback. We already have optional feedback processes but switching to 360 will enable our people to get a much wider view from varied stakeholders in the business and will give them a more comprehensive picture which is often better received then isolated feedback.
Setting stretching goals – for me and everyone in the team
The primary driver for this project was getting clarity on career pathways for our people – so making sure we can act on what goes into PDPs and that we are supporting our people to grow and developed their skills and careers with Talos360. But now that we’re moving ahead, other goals and benefits are emerging.
So, here’s a summary of what I plan to achieve within the next year:
Regular performance conversations. We will have easy forms to complete with no emailing, no messing around with formatting in Word or uploading!
High value conversations. That’s not to say they aren’t now, but once we have Appraisd, our people will be able to log their achievements and progress on objectives so once review time comes, they won’t be desperately trying to remember what they did 9 months ago! So, the conversation will be richer, more evidence-based, more valuable.
Alignment to values and company goals. It was very clear when I first started at Talos360 that the company values are central to the way daily life happens here. They’re already connected to our objectives but with Appraisd we’ll be able to connect company objectives with teams, people and values so we’re all aligned and pulling in the same direction.
Clarity on PDPs. While noting down your plans and ambitions with managers is a valuable exercise in itself, it’s really hard for me to synthesise all the information and act on it as they’re saved on peoples One Drive, and we have no viability of them. Therefore Appraisd now gives me visibility on what people want to achieve so I can help make it happen.
Priorities for training. We might have multiple team members looking to improve their presentation skills, their confidence, or their project management and at the moment that’s not easy for me to collate. If I can get an overview of PDPs that’ going to help us identify training priorities and get the right development activity in the diary.
Succession planning. We’re growing fast and new roles are emerging – how can we match our people to them? At the moment I don’t have sight of that but with Appraisd I’ll be able to match people with opportunities and development needs to we can start to look at where we have gaps and where people are ready to step up.
A massive reduction in HR admin. As a one-person team in a 100-person business, I am really looking to Appraisd taking care of a lot of the things I currently do manually: sending out review forms, chasing for meetings to be booked in and forms completed. This will free me up to be of much more value elsewhere – like all the points above around development and succession.
What does launching Appraisd look like?
We’re launching in October so it’s all systems go. Ahead of go-live, this is where we’ve got to with our Customer Success Manager (CSM) in the last few weeks:
✅System configuration. Going through how I’d like everything set up and what functions we’d like to be in the system from day one.
✅ Form uploads. I provided all our current forms to our CSM and they have now appeared in the system ready for use.
✅ HRIS sync. This was much easier than anticipated – our CSM set up the sync with our HRIS so now whenever we have a new joiner, leaver or promotion they’ll be enrolled in the right sequences in Appraisd.
✅Employee communications. At our fortnightly company update, I spoke to all our team about why we’re moving to Appraisd and the benefits that they are going to get from it.
✅ Training. This week our CSM ran a training session for managers and another one for all our colleagues. These were live but we’ve recorded them for anyone who missed them or wants to go back to them.
I see this launch as the first step on what I hope will be a journey towards continuous performance management in which managers and our people will have an ongoing conversations around performance and career planning with no annual spikes in activity or admin.
Yes, this is a major project for us at Talos360 but with the help of our CSM all the heavy lifting has been done in terms of the system set-up. Now it’s time to make sure we all get the benefits from Appraisd and so following the launch, I’ll be gathering feedback and lessons learned which I’ll share as we progress.
I hope you’ll follow our journey.
