End the annual performance review: APIs to your social influence

Ok, I know, I’ve been writing about ending annual performance review for ages, and people are still doing them.

I actually had a very interesting sit down with Steve Hunt, SVP customer value at SAP where we talked about our differing – but somewhat similar views. I want to do that chat justice with a “proper” blog, today is just a quick response to something else.

My fellow SAP Mentor  posted an interesting piece about some extracts that he’s been using to explain the impact of his social networking and how it is an effective performance indicator for use in his annual review.

http://productdesignjournal.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-add-your-twitter-blogger-and-sap.html

One of his comments got me thinking – wouldn’t it be great if not in an annual review, but just in a dashboard we could see something like performance via api

We could visualise the areas of influence in our team, and how much they were spreading that influence. Would this be a help for me as a manager to help understand if the strategies I’m putting in place make my team more effective as doing their job? We could take these feeds from any tool, from email, from Jam, from public social media, obviously with employee consent!

Now you could argue that my team doesn’t need to influence, that isn’t part of their role, but I’d have to disagree. Even if my team worked at the checkout counters of a local supermarket, I want them sharing what and how they do things best. Any team which is not spreading news about what they are capable of doing, and doesn’t share with others is a team which is not reaching its potential.

Perhaps in many situations it will be hard to find APIs that can express how knowledge sharing is happening, how influence is being generated, noting who is chatting about what over the lunch table and turning that into a graph seems a bit of overkill. But where it is possible, this is definitely something I think we should be grasping firmly. Let’s start building this into our talent management solutions, who knows, we might actually start finding out who is “talent” in our organisations and nurture them, rather than waiting annually to see if anyone has been innovative enough to try to capture this info. No more annual review, a constant monitoring and performance enhancement process. I dream, I know, I’ll write about it more in full later.

Right, back to writing Christmas cards and eating mince pies 🙂