In the past few years, we have seen the social enterprise take off at an unparalleled speed. Small businesses and big businesses in every industry — and even small teams — are leveraging social enterprise to connect their teams, assist in communication and projects, and share documents, among other things.

Companies are becoming more social, more open and more transparent. With the rise of the virtual workforce, it’s not much of a surprise that many of our emails, texts, and instant messages have been replaced with activity streams and status updates. The BCC and CC list is getting smaller, and messages that use to be 1-to-1 are now broadcast to our co-workers inside and outside of our team. Overall, it’s helping all of us become better, more knowledgable workers and guides us as we self-manage.

While modern workers are more connected to their peers, teams and the organization as a whole than ever before, many still don’t understand the direction of their team, co-workers outside of their small circle, or site location. Many cannot name the top priorities of a department or team they depend on. They see the status updates or a latest presentation post, but are still unclear on what the rest of the organization or team is focused on.

Does Sales understand Marketing’s Goals? Is Development in sync with the marketing plan for the launch of their latest release? This causes many of use to have limited views of the priorities of others, the accomplishment of others, and how their work impacts our success. To take this further, it’s very difficult to create a culture of recognition if you don’t know what the person next to you is attempting accomplish.

The modern worker feels “overall dissatisfaction” with performance reviews.

It’s pretty clear the employee base has spoken. Samuel A. Culbert sums it all up in “Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews.” And can you blame them? Do performance reviews really capture what an employee has completed in a given year? Do they help employees communicate better inside and outside of their team? The modern workforce is social and thrives off of open culture and better communication. They are results-driven and want to be measured on their results and contributions to the business. According to Globoforce survey, about 51% of the U.S. workforce feels that employee performance reviews do not actually gauge their work. Their vote: “Overall dissatisfaction.”

What does this adoption of the social enterprise mean in the performance management world?

Luckily, the Social Enterprise is educating every vendor in the performance management arena. Applications will have to leverage social components and design if they desire to engage the workforce, their end-users. Social enterprise is desired for every employee not just decision makers.

The future of social performance enterprise will provide every employee with the tools to see not just their past performance review, but a real WorkStory based on their social contributions and results.  Individual contributors, managers and decision-makers, will all have an equal view of top goals, top contributions, supporters of your work, and contributors that impact your success. It will focus on Social Insights as well as performance results. It will change the way we think about our contributions and turn it into a living, breathing work portfolio which we can all be proud of. We will be encouraged to contribute and support other’s goals. Feedback will not be a once-a-year discussion, it will happen weekly. This approach will help get employees on board and connect to the business direction as they browse through team and job role profiles.

Help is on the way.

The world has changed, and it’s important that we change our evaluation strategy when selecting a performance management or review system for our company. Ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish – a review score or an engaged workforce? Would your employees or co-workers be satisfied with this platform? Does it reflect your work and accomplishments over a given period of time?

The applications we adopt must center around the employee. We will seldom purchase applications that get used once or twice a year. Our evaluation team will be made up of employees and decision-makers.  This approach will assist with adoption and help you build a self-managing team and results-driven culture.

If you are not ready for the social performance and social goals, that’s okay. But it’s important that, when evaluating players for performance reviews, you hear your co-worker’s voices and ask what is in it for them.

Are you ready for Social Performance?

The basis for today’s modern social enterprise already involves sharing goals to separate teams or limited groups. The workers are showcasing their work in files, presentations, proposals, and status updates. In the future, the largest companies and the smallest teams will use social goals. They will socialize goals across the entire company, internal websites and content.

WorkSimple is the creator of Social Goals and is pushing the envelope of the performance management space with a platform that changes how employees feel about work.

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