For all of those Microsoftees working hard on their commitments for FY11, there are some interesting insights and arguments for introducing social behavioural analysis into the enterprise. I often hear people wondering whether the end of year rating system is totally fair and if managers personal opinions haven’t had something to do with the score. This statement might ring true for a few people working in large companies or who have little or no interaction with their manager. Sameer notes:
If you’ve moved up the ladder at work, you’re aware of 2 things:
1) Manager/Skip Level/ Peer Performance reviews drive progression BUT
2) Soft Metrics (i.e. how your boss and peers generally feel about you) often trump hard documented goals.
Sameers blog post goes on to discuss how the adoption of behavioural targeting can change the way that employees behave. Often employees who are on difficult to achieve targets will be reluctant to work on anything that doesn’t directly influence their objectives and are focused entirely on themselves or their immediate team. They are reluctant to collaborate with others as it will impact their performance and ultimately their end of year result. Unfortunately this isn’t a good idea if you want to have an agile company with everyone in tune about what’s going on and how they can help the company perform better.
When an email is distributed from the execs, the likelihood is that over 90% of the readers of the mail do not do anything about it. The same is true for social conversations. Look at your Twitter followers for example and see how many of them actually interact with you. But this exec memo was written for a reason, and it probably needs an action.
How valuable to the company are the employees that ignore the email? And how valuable are those that actively contributes. Sameer says:
Employees now can become crucial information brokers for these communications and social analytics gives exec comms a good idea of which pockets of influence to tap into to spread specific messages.
If organisations had social analysis tools, like this one by SocialCast, then the valuable interaction and collaboration between your colleagues and peers can be evaluated and their importance to the company as a whole. Active participants can be rewarded, whilst the lurkers in the organisation can be coached in the best ways to collaborate.
And at the end of the year, if you’ve been collaborating and contributing to your internal network, sharing knowledge inside the company, then there will be statistics to demonstrate your worth to the organisation and the personal opinion of your manager will hardly matter at all.
The new way of working? I think so. 🙂
Facebook, with the launch of Places have launched a new feature, which really takes advantage of location aware mobile devices. Now, you can check in at a place and Facebook will update your feed with your exact location. You can now see who else is at the same location as you so you can hook up with them. No more plaintive “is anyone in London this afternoon?” messages. You can instantly see where people are.
Eileen's Digital Technology 