Recent workforce disruptions have brought employee engagement and the employee experience into focus, prompting questions like: Could employees be productive working remotely? Could we successfully hire and onboard new employees from a distance? How do we prevent mass resignations at our company?
Answering these questions has become important for companies to succeed and grow. When it comes to employee engagement and the employee experience, much of the focus is on the employee. But what about the managers’ role? After all, the manager is one of the primary connections that determines an employee’s engagement and experience. Another is the work assigned to the employee, usually by their manager. According to recent Gallup data, 36% of U.S. employees are engaged while 15% are actively disengaged and “actively disengaged employees report miserable work experiences and are generally poorly managed.”
New Manager Engagement Solutions for Performance Management
NetSuite 2022 Release 1 offers new features to strengthen the connection between managers and employees with the following improvements to SuitePeople Performance Management:
- A new performance digest for managers. The automatically generated monthly report shows performance highlights and lowlights for each manager’s team and gives them the information they need to improve performance or recognize good work.
- More efficient goal management. Employees can now delete unapproved, erroneous or duplicate goals for better focus and employee experience.
- Better visibility into goal changes. The release provides a complete audit trail of changes to individual goals to improve communications between managers and direct reports.

These new features give managers better information on productivity and goal achievement. For example, managers can see which direct reports were given Kudos, kept their goals up to date or goals that are running behind. With this information, managers can proactively see when an employee starts to disengage and can take steps to try and get them re-engaged. When employees are aligned with their managers, have clear goals and are making progress on their goals, they are more engaged and are having a better employee experience.
New performance review scheduling capabilities give HR managers a more flexible and automated way to schedule performance reviews across the company based on relative dates. For example, a common practice is to evaluate new hire performance at 30, 60 and 90-day intervals as part of an overall retention strategy. Another practice is to schedule a performance review on the employee’s anniversary date. HR Managers can now define datasets using SuiteAnalytics to group and automatically schedule employee performance reviews based on relative dates.
Flexible Labor Costing with SuitePeople Payroll
Project or grant-based businesses need to keep accurate, detailed labor records to properly account for and report costs. Manually tying these costs together between payroll, timesheets and the general ledger can be both time consuming and error prone. Without the flexibility to post labor costs to the correct general ledger account and segment, companies must spend a lot of time reconciling detailed timesheet and payroll data to get the accounts to balance, create accurate bills and close the books each period.
NetSuite 2022 Release 1 adds more flexibility and automation to the labor costing allocation process by including the ability to post labor costs to custom general ledger segments like benefitting program or grant using data from SuitePeople Payroll and NetSuite timesheets. By unifying SuitePeople Payroll with NetSuite timesheets and general ledger, project-based companies can:
- Automate the allocation of labor costs to the benefitting program, grant or project
- Simplify the process of billing actual costs to the Grantor on cost-reimbursable grants
- Easily view and report on total direct costs of running a program or project including actual labor costs

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Record Enhancement
Enhancements have been made to the Gender field in the employee record and now include possible values for Non-Binary and Not Specified. Anyone using the NetSuite employee record benefits from this enhancement. Employees now have more inclusive options to self-identify their gender. Companies now have more accurate records to reflect the diversity of their workforce.
Power of the Suite
SuitePeople 2022 Release 1 continues to provide new features to strengthen the relationship between managers employees to keep them both engaged, productive with a positive workplace experience regardless of current or future workforce disruptions. HR professionals can save time with more flexibility and automation to manage the performance review process. By automating the critical process of allocating total labor costs to custom general ledger segments using data from SuitePeople Payroll, businesses improve accuracy and save time. With new record keeping options for gender identification, all employees can feel included while companies have more accurate information on the diversity of their workforce.
Want to learn more about NetSuite 2022 Release 1?
Any customer who's gone through previous NetSuite refreshes knows that no blog post can do justice to all the new functions and capabilities in NetSuite 2022 Release 1.
For a more complete picture of what the new features can deliver, read the release notes (opens in new tab).
Most importantly, don't forget to request access to your Release Preview test account (opens in new tab). Nothing substitutes for hands-on access to see how all the new features will work with your data, workflows, and customizations.
The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.