Social performance platforms are increasingly becoming the way managers encourage their workforce to perform at their ultimate level, whether you’re a small team working in a big company or monitoring a brand new crop of employees. At its core, social performance platforms encourage communication, and therefore make engagement happen in an easier, less forcible fashion. Here’s how:

Employees receive feedback in real-time

Social performance platforms streamline communication, instead of making it more difficult or artificial.

For example, say your marketing team is working on a huge project. By utilizing a social performance platform, you not only give them an avenue to have effective communication within (i.e. who’s doing what and the progress that’s being made), but you also open up the conversation between employee and manager. As a leader, you can keep employees in the loop when it comes to each and every project and goal, making their job easier and the outcome more positive.

The bottom line here is simple: social performance platforms lead to feedback because things are more transparent. Because of these platforms, we know who’s in charge of writing the press release today. We know who’s designing the website. We know who has to land two new clients this month. Plus, employees can figure out what they need to work on and what they can keep doing well in real-time, which is more than can be said for quarterly or annual performance reviews when benchmarks don’t really matter anymore.

Your workforce becomes more self-organized

When you’re workforce isn’t organized and workers aren’t having the right conversations, things can end up in shambles. With that said, self-organization is one of the keys to overcoming many communication challenges because team members start taking control.

Let’s break this down: Social performance platforms allow employees to join or create teams, select managers and job roles, and follow co-workers. When they do so, employees automatically start to organize how things work everyday, without the need to ask a million questions (i.e. they become more self-aware). In the same vein, they can find information they need immediately, rather than sending another group e-mail and waiting for an update.

In essence, employees are in control when it comes to their own roles. This helps them becomes more self-motivated, and therefore more self-organized, because they actually have a stake in what they are doing.

New conversations will happen

Sure, if you want lots of engagement with a social platform, your employees actually have to use it. However, when this happens, it will instantly spark new conversations that have never taken place before, leading to more discussions, goal planning, collaboration, and an overall appreciation for the team and company.

So, say your sales team had a hard time getting on the same page before using a social performance platform. Once they actually start to use it, things not only make more sense (like who doing what this week), but the platform also triggers new conversations to happen because there’s a path to do so.

For example, James may have a great idea and shares it with Kelly on the platform, who ends up utilizing it during a pitch, landing a new client. All it took was one conversation, which probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise…especially if communication wasn’t a priority beforehand.

What do you think? Do you use social performance platforms like WorkSimple? Do you find that they encourage effective communication? Why or why not?