We just pushed out a few great improvements to Kin – the most noteworthy of which is Employee Objectives. It’s a build up to our Performance Review tool which will be out toward the end of September. In addition, there’s a new font face in Kin that’ll support our ever-growing population outside of the US. Finally, we’ve improved Kin’s performance. Please read on for details, and let us know if you have any questions.
Employee Objectives
Employee objectives are core elements of employee reviews. They’re like building blocks that help employees grow professionally with the company. We’ve wrapped up this portion of Kin’s Reviews & Objectives feature (the Performance Reviews feature is due out toward the end of September) and are excited to share it with you and your team!
Creating Objectives
An employee can create their own objectives in their profile in Kin. Any HR Manager or the employee’s assigned Manager can also create objectives for employees.
Objectives include a title and description, along with a status of the objective’s progress and when it’s due.
As an employee works toward their objective, they can leave Progress Notes sharing how the objective is coming along and if they’re running into any roadblocks. The employee’s assigned Manager will receive notification of the update and can leave a note themselves. These notes are a good way to track the history of the objective’s completion and are super useful during an employee’s review.
Other Noteworthy Improvements
Along with Employee Objectives, we’ve made a few other updates to Kin!
A New Typeface for Kin
We’ve swapped out Kin’s app font, Avenir, for Proxima Nova, to better support our non-US customers. It’s a subtle difference style-wise that makes a huge improvement for folks who were getting the short end of the glyph-stick (looking at you, Czech Republic!).
Time-Off Requests – Default to Work Schedule
Previously when creating a time-off request, the start and end times within the request would default to the standard 9am-5pm work schedule regardless of the one set for that particular time-off policy. Now when creating a request, after the time-off policy is selected the start and end times will populate with that policy’s set work schedule, including applicable break-time.
Performance Improvements to the App
Finally, there are a few performance improvements we’ve made around the app that’ll help things move along more quickly:
- We’ve streamlined & removed excess images to reduce page weight
- We’ve implemented a new system for optimizing JavaScript for the site – so users only load what they need when they need it (for the technically inclined, Kin now sports an implementation of asynchronous module definition).
- Kin’s also doing a better job caching assets that can be reused later in sessions instead of being downloaded again.