What are your annual, quarterly or monthly reviews based on? Sales numbers? Goals? Campaigns executed? Leads generated? Probably something along those lines, right? Well, things might be different in the near future: employee reviews could be based on organizational influence.
Last spring, Salesforce.com’s Chatter system released a new feature called Influencer. It aims to measure how influential employees are, by tabulating, for example, how your fellow workers respond to the items posted to the corporate social network.
In a recent interview with Fast Company, the Senior Director of Chatter Product Marketing, Dave King, said companies are using this tool to operate more smoothly. King said he’s heard stories about companies launching new releases, and they’ll look up who the most influential people are throughout different departments, based on the rankings on Influencer. This way, executives can look to these employees for ideas of how to best roll out the new system.
Chatter is not the only product that has a tool to rank influence among organizations. Yammer and National Field are also working to create similar programs.
According to Fast Company’s article, “The most progressive organizations have always realized that the informal connections employees make with others and the amount of knowledge and expertise they share outside of prescribed work responsibilities contributes mightily to the bottom line. But until now, they haven't had an empirical way of measuring that activity.”
In addition to increased productivity and knowledge sharing, both within their own right a big value add, tools like this have the opportunity to increase satisfaction and loyalty. Empowering employees to share their ideas and collaborate across the enterprise can dramatically increase their engagement and overall job satisfaction. This will ultimately lead to increased customer retention. It’s a fact that happy employees deliver better customer experiences, and are more likely to go the extra mile to make customers happy.
Influencer’s algorithm is confidential; however, Salesforce.com will say that simply “being noisy” does not count. Posts to the corporate social network need to contain functional content, not fluff.
What are your thoughts on this? Does your company have something like this in place already? Does this seem like a fair way to determine an outcome of an employee review? Would your employees be satisfied with this?
I personally have mixed feelings on this topic. What about the employees who have been with the company for many years that always excel within the realm of their responsibilities (but are not familiar with social networks or expressing their ideas online because tasks like that are not part of their day-to-day job). What about those employees who are not fond of publicly sharing their ideas, but out-perform their numbers year after year? I understand leaders should be influencers, but I don’t think companies can move to solely using a tool like this to determine an employee’s review/raise/promotion. Other factors that we currently use should still be mixed into the equation.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Read the full article for more information.