Sombra Cut Review Cycle Setup to Under an Hour
Sombra's HR team was buried in spreadsheets, emails, and Google Forms every review cycle. With Peoplelogic, setting up a cycle takes under an hour.
<1 hr
to set up a review cycle
90%
survey response rate
56%
headcount growth in 2 years
Sombra is a software company in Ukraine. Headcount grew 56% in two years, during wartime, and Clutch named it one of the top software development companies of 2022.
That growth put Sombra's HR team under pressure. Planning review cycles, collecting feedback, and following up with participants took more of their time every cycle.
With Peoplelogic, managing performance is faster, easier, and less stressful. It helps us gather feedback and organize review cycles without hundreds of forms and sheets. Employees started to fill out reviews faster, Peoplelogic is like a game for them.
Nataliia Shulzhenko
Resource Manager
Sombra runs continuous feedback alongside a 360 review twice a year. Feedback comes from managers, peers, direct reports, customers, and the employee. HR collects it and shares it with the manager and employee, and they meet to discuss it and set development goals.
The process worked, and Sombra wanted to keep it as the team grew.
What Sombra needed
- Fully automated 360 reviews and goal setting
- Room to customize the tool to their own review workflow
- A simpler evaluation process that employees could see into
The challenge
Sombra's review process worked well early on, with about 90% of employees taking part in monthly review cycles. As the company grew, the tools behind it (email, Google Forms, and Excel) stopped keeping up. HR struggled to:
- get every employee to take part
- send each form to the right people
- get responses back on time
Missed emails and repeated follow-ups were eating HR's time, so Sombra decided to automate the process.
The solution
Sombra had specific requirements, and few tools met them. They wanted something fully automated and customizable, which led them to Peoplelogic.
They set it up in four steps:
- Ran a first cycle with a pilot group.
- Set up company templates and evaluation questions.
- Customized the personal development plan template.
- Sent everyone an announcement, with screenshots, explaining the new process and why they were making the change.
"If the tool is hard, it may remove all the desire to participate in the process. Peoplelogic is intuitive, so we didn't spend much time educating employees about it."
Svitlana Aksyonova, HR Business Partner
How it works now
Peoplelogic took several jobs off HR's plate: tracking feedback in spreadsheets, managing access rights, and copying in feedback from emails and Google Forms.
Sombra's review process now works like this:
- HR spends about an hour each month setting up a review cycle. The templates are already configured, so HR only picks the participants.
- One dashboard shows cycle progress, sends reminders, and shares results.
- HR meets with each employee and their manager to discuss feedback and set goals for the next cycle.
- Managers make sure every employee has a personal development plan and track progress on it.
- Managers and employees hold regular 1:1s between reviews.
Sombra replaced a manual review process with one that runs on its own between cycles. Reviews stay consistent from one cycle to the next, and employees can see every step of the process.
Turn “we should fix performance” into a repeatable rhythm.
A 30-minute walkthrough with someone who has set this up for a two-person HR team before. No deck.