HR Pulse

Crowd sourcing: Social performance management tool

Josh Bersin predicted: “In 2012, we will see the practices of ‘social’ start to revolutionise rewards and recognition, learning, performance management, recruiting, and career management”.Eric Mosley in a Harvard Business Review Blog concurs, saying that, “We're on the cusp of a major change that uses the power of social to fundamentally shift from a traditional, top-down management hierarchy to a new bottom-up approach”.

What exactly does this mean in the context of performance management? James Holincheck states in a Gartner Report in March 2012 that many organisations do not believe they have a good pay-for-performance process and that in fact, many find that these programmes do not increase performance. He further states that many employees find traditional performance reviews unfair and demotivating and that many managers and executives are not good at providing workers with high-quality, consistent and timely performance feedback. He suggests that social recognition programmes and solutions can help improve employee motivation and performance, while decreasing reliance on manager and executive feedback.

SABA describes a social performance management approach as fostering ongoing, collaborative conversations, as well as timely actionable coaching and mentoring so that employees can improve their performance rapidly. It further captures the feedback from all relevant stakeholders and builds a high performance culture where everyone’s feedback counts.

This means that performance management moves away from being an annual or bi-annual event towards a process of ongoing feedback from the entire business network in order to improve the quality and relevance of the performance reviews. The mechanism used to achieve this is called ‘Crowd-sourcing’. Dawn MacKay, vice president of Halogen Software in Ottawa, Ontario, defines the approach as “taking full advantage of feedback and input, both solicited and unsolicited, from as many sources as possible, to inform the assessment of an employee’s performance.”

Eric Mosley argues that a group of independently deciding individuals is more likely to make better decisions and more accurate observations than those of an individual. According to him, crowd-sourcing, by leveraging social recognition data, is a better way for managers to collect, evaluate and share information on employee performance. It means that we capture input from many places, rather than a few or just one, enabling organisations to extend performance evaluations beyond a single point of view in order to reveal how employees are truly performing and influencing others in the organisation.

Crowd-sourcing and social performance management have the following advantages:

• Multiple viewpoints of performance/non-performance. Instead of relying on just one-or a few people’s inputs regarding the employee’s performance, a rich tapestry of feedback is created.
  
  
• Feedback represents the whole performance period and does not only focus on the most recent events. Performance achievements are captured throughout the year. Crowd-sourcing uses systems that capture individual and team achievements and successes (and non-achievements) at the moment they happen throughout the year.
  
  
• According to Mosley, these systems use inspiration, not obligation as a motivating factor. When peers give reviews of each other, they are able to recognise strong performance and report on what they witness.

• A more accurate view of performance. By getting a broader view of the employee’s performance and achievements the organisation can create a more complete assessment around employees' reputation and work performance.
  
  
• Organisational goal alignment is also improved, as getting feedback from the business network about goal attainment makes the goals more aligned and highly focused (SABA).
  
  
• According to SABA crowd-sourcing also helps to identify hidden talent in the organisation.
  
  
• It helps to make the performance management process more transparent, thus ensuring that managers and employees pay more careful attention to the whole concept.

 
It is however not all positive. In his article ‘Inviting the masses to rate employee performance’, Steve Taylor mentions concerns by some employers that individuals who have it in for a co-worker, boss or internal customer might use this as another avenue to vent or to seek revenge. He adds that crowd-sourcing performance review information for promotional, salary and other employment decisions will have people on edge and paranoid as they speculate about who said what. He further cited employers who were concerned that crowd-sourcing feedback can result in unfortunate diversity-related implications. These employers were of the view that extroverted employees might be advantaged over introverted, but equally valuable contributors. According to them crowd-sourcing could have a negative impact on employee engagement.

It is important to do intensive research on exactly how crowd-sourcing could benefit your organisation and to see what technology could be used to enhance the process. Performance management will however be influenced by the social trend and we should be prepared to be able to leverage its benefits to our organisation’s and employees’ advantage.