BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Reevaluating Performance Management

Following
This article is more than 10 years old.

I had a chance to talk directly to Amy Wilson, CEO of Wilson Insight and VP/Analyst with Constellation Research Group, on my last day at Enterprise 2.0 conference. Although I missed her session, we had a few moments to talk about her topic of revising how organizations and employees look at performance management. In particular, how we keep a record of what we actually do over a year of work, and get feedback on our efforts from those we engage in our work.

Analyst Amy Wilson (Source: Constellation Research Group)

Ms. Wilson was careful to distinguish keeping a record of what we do versus the annual or semi-annual performance reviews with management. The latter usually results in recordkeeping just for the sake of maintaining a system of record, but is rarely used. Instead what we were discussing is storing collective knowledge about the particulars of any project or task so that we as employees may refer to it for our own, or even shared recall of activities.

This can be used to understand our performance, contribution and record of what we have accomplished over time. However, it also helps to preserve knowledge that we gather from many different sources, in different modes of interaction. This turns what we do into observable work.

Observable work is a practice to turn what we do in our daily tasks actions, knowledge and insight into recorded information that we can lookup or reuse later if we need to, or in the case of social business be able to share this view of our work with others of our choosing.

Here's a simple case we use in our own organization: a salesperson can save all their notes, emails, meetings, even voicemail into a single repository per client or client engagement, and then keep track of all their engagements over the year. What's more, they can involve other people on their team or really anyone they need help or expertise from across the company because it is part of the enterprise collaboration environment.

The difference from typical lead management software is the freedom to create their own view of the structure of the information, and also being able to bring or transfer the context of almost all they know about each lead with their manager, or others in their sales team. This makes their work easily observable to others; reduces the number of queries on particular details of the project, reduce sales cadence calls, and prevent the loss of knowledge as salespeople transfer or move out of their job.

The subtler psychological point is that it is easier to document and track a project or activity if you can do it in the flow of what you are doing, rather than returning after the activity is complete. Software systems should be able to help us do a better job here such as keeping track of who is involved, when something occurred or even detect keywords or meta-data about the project. However, it is still a personal work habit or learned behavior that the employee has to take to heart.

In talking to Larry Hawes, analyst and consultant at Dow Brook Advisory Services, vendors like Traction Software and IBM provide the tools to support managing a practice of observable work. A number of employees use social software at my own company to help them record their work contributions throughout the year. There are in fact so many, that several different folks have created reusable templates to record their work and shared this with others. The Activities template creation capability in IBM Connections, what we use on the IBM intranet, makes it possible for people in different job roles or with differing reporting requirements to create their own custom version fairly simply, and in the flow of how they work, very much like a record button.

Beyond recording one's work, Ms Wilson also noted the need to get feedback on our work tasks and quality. Unlike performance reviews however, this can be from any number of people we work with—our peers, project members, manager, mentors, or even other experts—and at any time we choose to. The goal is to look at different scales of our performance so we can decide for ourselves how we can improve, especially in the small scale rather than the broad strokes of annual reviews.

What I did point out is that this practice of gathering feedback is often forgotten, ignored, avoided, and sometimes even reviled--I would dare say perhaps we have been doing it wrong for many years, in too many anguishing ways. The point of having reviews in observable work is to develop self-awareness and reflection. A good manager understands that self-directed improvement goes further than anything they might say. Getting feedback and guidance from a wider base than one's direct manager also provides broader, well-rounded insight.

I consider such feedback collection a form of collective intelligence that can be assisted with software. Toronto-based company Rypple for example provides a means for individuals to send out and collect input from their network, whether identified or anonymous. The company refers to this as social performance management to allow employees and HR teams to identify and track their goals and actions so that they may gather feedback from people in their ‘loop’. This also allows a system of tracking peer or manager recognition, eventually factoring into their organizational reputation.

These changes to how we handle performance reviews are part of the social transformation of HR, within the larger Fifth shift in how technology is fundamentally changing the way we do business. People are definitely part of the equation, but the impact is really felt in the change in organizational operational infrastructure through the change from fairly closed, often-sequential processes to appropriately transparent, networked interaction. What we achieve out of this is a better understanding of the work we each do across the organization, what people think of the results, and our abilities and reputation.