Bear with me while I go all boring on you here.
I’m commenting on another blog – one I love, about ideas, much bigger and more sweeping stuff than my little keep-the-grandparents-updated journal here – and we’re having an online comment discussion about performance in business. How do we measure people’s performance? How SHOULD we? Why do we?
Anyway, it’s obvious to everyone in the world that yearly performance reviews are a total waste of time. Have you ever met someone who was dying to get his review? Met a manager who was excited about writing them? How many of you have been blindsided by a wretched review that came at the end of a year when you thought you were doing a great job? A year is too long to go between reviews, and reviews are such a burden on managers that asking them to do them quarterly would be torturous, both for the manager and for the poor HR Manager who would constantly have to nag.
So here’s my genius idea that will never go anywhere, that’s meant to make performance feedback simple, immediate, and constant. Facebook for business!
OK, so Employees A, B, and C all report to Manager 1. Manager 1 gets A, B, and Cs outlook calendar engagements automatically fed to his homepage as status updates. A, B, and C can also manually put in status updates – We signed the contract today! – OR – I got held up on a call with corporate so my TPS report is late. The Manager can comment briefly – good work on the contract!; can push a Likes, Dislikes, or Warning button (that only he can see,); he can write on his employees’ Walls – I needed that report, please make it a priority. This doesn’t replace face to face contact, nor does it replace email or memos or whatever. However, what it does is this:
- Makes what the employees are doing day in and day out more transparent for the Manager, and gives him the flow of their day.
- Lets him right quick jot off some feedback to people as his memory is jogged by their updates, rather than thinking – Dude, I need to tell B that his presentation needed work – and then getting caught up and forgetting and then it’s five weeks later and whoops, the chance has passed.
- Eliminates the once a year holy shit factor of formal performance reviews, and instead makes instant feedback a little more likely. And instant feedback, of course, is much more useful if you want to change behavior.
Potential problems:
- The "facebook generation" would totally get this, and the Boomers and Gen Xers would probably not. There is always the danger that the more computer literate and the younger ones who grew up with this stuff would come off as better performers because they are more capable of navigating the site – a pitfall that would have to be addressed with lots of training.
- It has to stay simple, and it would have the tendency I think to become complicated, as most things in business do. In fact, maybe it should be more like twitter – limits on the number of characters that a message can be, to force people to be brief.
- It requires literacy and written tact on the part of the managers.
- It could lead to less face time, which is not its purpose.
But, you know. I think it’s a start!
And now I’m off to tabulate a huge report that no one will read about how our yearly performance reviews went. Yeah. Those reviews. That were supposed to be complete in December. And I’m still missing at least 5. And none of them have been signed. And most of them are pretty much useless, going-through-the-motions-so-HR-will-leave-me-alone nonsense. But I still have to pretend they are very worthwhile and compile a report and analyze the results and propose action items that will never get done because they might – gasp – cost money.
So, cheerio.
I think GSK does use facebook for networking and day to day tracking.
I am SOOO cutting edge.