This Definitive Guide will help you navigate the chaos that marks Corporate America; a Corporate America that’s in flux as it struggles with the shifting paradigms of a consumer technology-driven workplace. This Definitive Guide will help you:

• Make sense of the social shift within the enterprise.
• Get a handle on the concepts of Social Performance and Social Goals; and
• Leverage social technologies to drive focus and engagement.

This Definitive Guide was compiled based on crowdsourced insights of the WorkSimple team and its network of social enterprise gurus, end-users and friends.

WHO IS THIS DEFINITIVE GUIDE FOR?

• Users who are new to Social Performance and Social Goals
• Users who are looking for a better way for employees to work together
• Users who are looking for alternatives to traditional performance management models (including the dreaded performance review)
• Users who are already using Social Performance platforms who want to drive more value from the cloud-based software

HOW TO USE THIS DEFINITIVE GUIDE

You can make the most of this Definitive Guide by weaving these best practices and strategies into your corporate culture—and perhaps allowing them to drive a social evolution in your workforce—no matter who is doing the work or where it is getting done.

Whether your workforce is traditional, or has mobile, virtual and global components, this
Definitive Guide offers practical insights for getting everyone on the same results-driven
page. And whether your workforce is dominated by Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y—or a
cross-representation of these demographics—this Definitive Guide helps everyone understand how Social Goals works and how it can breed a culture of productivity, employee empowerment, employee engagement and social recognition.

Of course, any corporate culture shift needs buy in from executives, including the human
resources department. In fact, HR is at the heart of the Social Performance revolution. So
send this Definitive Guide to your company’s HR gurus now and compare notes later.

INTRODUCTION

If you are reading this Definitive Guide, you’ve taken the hint: the business landscape—and the workforce that empowers it—has changed and continues to change. The world of work looks much different today than it did five years ago and will look much different five years from now than it does today.

Think social. Think mobile. Think multi-generational. Think global. Think unpredictable.
Think disruptive. Think chaos. But don’t stop thinking because a new generation of workers is moving fast. Modern workers are staying with the same company for a mere 2.2 years. That makes it more difficult than ever to drive peak performance from employees, many of which don’t stick around long enough to fully understand your corporate culture, let alone embrace it.

Despite the break-neck speed of the modern workplace, some companies still don’t recognize the need to make a cultural shift. Others are looking to make the shift in a way that reflects how they are currently working—in top down silos. But that’s not realistic in a workplace that is already moving toward all things social with or without a green light from the head office.

INTRODUCTION

This equation works because it aligns with the realities of the modern business landscape
and the increasingly diverse workforce.

Traditional performance management models fail to equip managers with the tools they need to become mentors who coach employees through project challenges and recognize workers for innovations that impact the bottom line. While annual reviews leave employees in an uncomfortable limbo, Social Goals drives engagement that breeds better performance.

On the flip side, many companies—and the teams within them—know they are exceeding goals. These companies may not have a formal Social Performance platform, but they are nonetheless beating the Social Performance drum as best they can with what disparate tools they have. These companies need to set a clear focus and open the lines of communication via a platform that shows how individuals and teams are at the top of their game.

INTRODUCTION

The bottom line to business and cultural transformation is this: Every executive wants a culture of engagement; every manager wants to streamline communication to drive stronger results; and every employee wants to be empowered for career success. Social Goals gives you the tools you need to drill into that bottom line—and hit the pay dirt of productivity.

Social Goals lets executives and management set the direction—and lets employees set goals on how to get there. It’s a natural cultural shift that fosters innovative thinking and ideation among the workforce as they strive toward attainable goals that match their skill set instead of lofty management-created goals that set them up for failure. Social Goals plays on the strengths of individual members of the team—the whole team—to take your company where it wants to go.

Employees appreciate Social Goals because it helps them shape the direction of their career by allowing them to play on their strengths even as they improve their weaknesses. Managers appreciate Social Goals because it helps them drive a culture of collaboration in which they become coaches and mentors. And executives appreciate Social Goals because it engages employees—and engaged employees are productive employees.

A 2012 FPC National study reveals 79% of professionals are planning to look for a new job when the market improves. That’s dangerously close to 100% of employees. Although the study points to plenty of chair swapping just ahead, the reality is companies that can engage and empower employees are going to be the winners in the impending round of talent wars.

Do we have your attention? We figure you might be reading this ebook because you are experiencing—or are hoping not to experience—one of the following symptoms (symptoms that could indicate your employees are preparing to jump ship):

• Disengagement
• Missed results, delayed deliverables or project deadlines
• No visibility into results, goals, projects, or priorities
• High turnover

Social Goals sets the stage for career management by employees and leadership—creating greater possibilities for a win-win that keeps your best and brightest talent on board for much longer than the typical 2.2 years. So if you are ready to learn how to strengthen your corporate culture and drive stronger results, read on for strategies and tactics that will help you reach your goals.

A DAY IN AN EMPLOYEE’S LIFE
WITHOUT SOCIAL GOALS

Adrian is frustrated, disempowered and disengaged. He gets to work every day without clarity on how he can best drive results for the company.

• Information silos delay progress
• Lack of visibility disrupts team rhythm
• No worker connection hampers collaboration
• Group meetings offer limited direction

A DAY IN AN EMPLOYEE’S LIFE
WITHOUT SOCIAL GOALS

Since his company deployed Social Goals, Adrian is excited about getting to work and eager to make an impact on the organization. He logs in to Social Goals to see where his coworkers left off.

• Coworker updates display recent activity
• His profile page shows what goals he’s working on now and what’s next
• Company tab shows a new Focus to tackle
• Adrian enters a new goal to support the company Focus

HOW SOCIAL GOALS
BENEFIT ADRIAN

Adrian feels empowered and engaged—and Social Goals play a role. Adrian reports the following benefits from using Social Goals:
• The Social Performance platform works the way he does.
• Communication around a company Focus is clear.
• He can have an anywhere, any-time sense of accomplishment.
• He gets feedback on his goals in real time.
• He has an ability to see how his goals fit into the bigger picture.
• He has real-time interactions with coworkers and managers.
• He has a history of his engagement.
• He can see a portfolio of his accomplishments.
• He has an understanding of where he fits into the company and why his work matters.

ARE YOU READY
FOR THE SOCIAL SHIFT?

OK, so that’s sort of a trick question. The social shift within enterprise—and the social shift within Human Resources—is no longer a lofty idea. The social shift is well underway and rapidly advancing. In fact, your competitors may have already embraced these concepts while you are still exploring the possibilities.

The good news is there’s still time for you to get on the cutting-edge with Social Goals—and driving a social shift in your enterprise is as easy as using Facebook.

Most enterprises are still approaching performance management the way our fathers did. But traditional performance reviews don’t engage your team on your mission, vision and direction. Put another way, the classic performance management model is just as obsolete as the typewriter. The workforce has changed (read: mobile, virtual, distributed and multigenerational) and the workplace has changed (read: cloud computing, social networks, collaboration tools and team focus).

Traditional performance reviews don’t capture what is going on in the workforce today for a good reason: they can’t keep up with the harried pace. Employees want performance reviews that reflect the work they are actually doing, not just a subjective measurement on skillsets. Social Goals delivers.

PERFORMANCE IS NOT
JUST FOR HR ANYMORE

Traditional performance management was relegated to the annals of the Human Resources department. But performance isn’t just for HR anymore.

Indeed, Social Performance is for People Managers, Team Leaders and even coworkers who want to demonstrate what they’ve achieved in the spirit of innovation and collaboration. Social Performance is for anyone and everyone who wants to leverage new ways to communicate smarter, faster and more effectively on organizational goals.

Greater job stress. Decreasing productivity. Constant distractions. Lack of clarity on goals and expectations. Poor communication. When you add all this up over time you get one result: high turnover—and it can be a vicious circle that breeds an ever-deteriorating corporate culture.

The truth is, job stress is a fact of life, and so are distractions. But you do have control over how you communicate goals and expectations. You can correct costly performance management breakdowns by embracing Social Performance at every level within the organization. And you need to because today’s workers are craving a social shift in the enterprise. Social Goals is custom-designed to meet the high demands of the modern workers.

ONE SMALL STEP
FOR SOCIAL GOALS

Before you get too intimidated about the social shift in the enterprise, step back for a moment and look at the big picture. It’s likely that you’ve already started the social shift, perhaps without even realizing it.

Are you using Yammer, Jive Software or Socialcast? Then you are actively engaged in social collaboration. Are you leveraging Box.net, Google Docs or Office 365? Then you are forging ahead with social documents. Are you tapping into Zendesk, Getsatisfaction or UserVoice? Then you are knee deep into social customer feedback. Are you actively engaged with Basecamp or PivotalTracker? Then you are fully embracing social project management.

You are already sharing documents, cases and questions across the enterprise. All it takes is one small step to get your goals out of the digital prisons called e-mail and spreadsheets. Social Goals makes it possible for you to start sharing, tracking and measuring progress toward goals within minutes, all while engaging and empowering your employees to steer their career as they accomplish tangible results for your company.

UNDERSTANDING THE
EMPLOYEE LIFECYCLE

Everything in life has a cycle—even your employees. But employee lifecycles are much different today than they were even 20 years ago. Indeed, the 21st century employee lifecycle offers a completely new perspective on how we look at workers.

That means the average employee will work at your firm for about two years before moving on to the next firm, where he will also work for only two years before again moving on… you get the picture.

With this migrant mindset, why should employees care about performance appraisals? The obvious answer is—they don’t. They care instead about building professional experience for their next job. Any performance appraisal you decide to offer has to keep this new paradigm in mind. Practically speaking, that means modern performance appraisals need a less formal, more real-time edge that offers rapid feedback and recognition.

WHAT EMPLOYEES WANT

Study after study shows that the new generation of employees wants to make more money, have more fun, and help more people. They want to work at what they love. Here’s an equation to illustrate the shift:

Social Goals helps you engage your workers (which breeds enjoyment), recognize your workers (which offers meaning) and reward your workers (which means both short-term financial incentives and longer-term advancement).

WHAT IS SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
AND SOCIAL GOALS?

So far, we’ve been talking about Social Goals and Social Performance like it’s old hat in your organization. So before we go any further, let’s clearly define the benefits of these cloud-based technologies.

Social Performance is modernizing how we work together, how we look at our impact inside our organizations, how we engage with coworkers, and how we understand the contributions of individuals who support our efforts. That’s vital to attracting and retaining talent from all generations and recognizing top performers.

WorkSimple’s Social Goals is the first Social Performance platform to unify these themes. Social Goals represent a new paradigm for business transformation by driving transparency across the organization. Social Goals provides personal and professional value to every employee by setting the stage for a results-oriented workplace where everyone is recognized for their contributions toward company objectives.

HOW SOCIAL GOALS
IMPACTS CRITICAL FUNCTIONS

Can we get über real? Employer-led, top down goals stifle innovation and frustrate forward-thinking employees. If the new generation of employees wants to make more money, have more fun, help more people, and work at what they love—and they do—then employer-led, top down goals are going against the flow of Gen X and Gen Y.

Social Goals opens the field for employees to create their own goals on the path to organizational results. Taking this approach, Social Goals helps coworkers, teams and companies transform four critical areas of the organization by eliminating surprises around productivity. Those four areas are:

THE PERFORMANCE FACTOR

At the end of the day—and the beginning and middle of the day, for that matter—it’s all about performance, isn’t it? Performance drives results. Results drive competitiveness. And competitiveness drives revenues. Well, Social Goals drives performance. Here’s how:

1. You can’t improve what you can’t see. Social Goals gives you the ability to see performance around a key company Focus, i.e. company mission, vision and objectives.
2. You can’t engage around what’s not clear. Social Goals helps employees at all levels engage around a key focus or initiative by making it clear who is responsible for what—and the finish line teams are marching toward.
3. You can’t congratulate anonymous superstars. Social Goals showcases the top teams and top performers and shows where they have the greatest impact.
4. You can’t overcome what you don’t know is in the way. Social Goals exposes where the team or organization is having delivery challenges.
5. You can’t communicate everything in one meeting. Social Goals empowers employees to communicate updates, challenges and shifting priorities on the fly in between team meetings.Are you starting to get the Social Performance picture? Social Goals helps you see the factors that drive performance. This intuitive interface can even uproot which teams
need new management, eliminate productivity surprises, and help you raise expectations along the way.

Are you starting to get the Social Performance picture? Social Goals helps you see the factors that drive performance. This intuitive interface can even uproot which teams need new management, eliminate productivity surprises, and help you raise expectations along the way.

THE ENGAGEMENT FACTOR

Engagement is a buzzword in today’s enterprise—and for good reason. New research from Temkin Group reveals a strong link between the level of employee engagement and the effort and commitment of employees. Compared to disengaged employees, highly engaged employees are:

• 480% more committed to helping their company succeed
• 250% more likely to do something good for the company that’s unexpected of them
• 250% more likely to make a recommendation about an improvement
• 370% more likely to recommend that a friend or relative apply for a job
• 30% less likely to take a sick day

“Employee engagement is one of the key foundations to long-term success. Employee engagement has been one of the core competencies that we’ve stressed with companies for a long time and now we have quantitative evidence to make the case that it’s critically important.”
— Bruce Temkin, author of the report and Managing Partner of Temkin Group

THE ENGAGEMENT FACTOR

With Temkin Group’s research in mind—along with a CareerBuilder.com survey that noted 63% of those surveyed said managers lack the skills to engage employees—the buzz around engagement may grow even louder this year. Social Goals helps you drive that all-important engagement with employees at every level.

Traditional performance management models offer top-down vision casting at infrequent intervals. Social Goals empowers every employee to make better decisions by offering real-time visibility into the company or team direction.

Traditional performance management models offer feedback once or twice a year during performance reviews. Social Goals offers a continual stream of feedback from coworkers and management to ensure all workers are engaged and focused on the right priorities at the right time.

So at the end of the day—at the beginning and middle of the day—Social Goals sets the stage for stronger engagement and better results with less management overhead. Social Goals breeds a culture of feedback and recognition that encourages workers to engage at the highest levels.

THE COMMUNICATION FACTOR

David Grossman, internal communications and leadership expert and founder and CEO of The Grossman Group, may have put it best when he recently said, “E-mail is an important part of our daily lives, but e-mail can be an endless beast of pointless distractions, drawn out disagreements and manic messages.”

Then there’s the challenge of the multigenerational workforce. Five generations with vastly different communication, values and ideals are expected to gel together for a common cause in the modern workplace—and poor communication can lead to lower morale, higher employee turnover and lower productivity.

The uncomfortable truth: Companies still have a long way to go in improving internal communication and collaboration. In a Yammer/Harris Interactive survey, 34% of participants said communication bottlenecks negatively impact their productivity at work; 30% said they don’t have all the information needed to do their jobs; and 22% said that long, ineffective meetings negatively impact their productivity.

THE COMMUNICATION FACTOR

Social Goals overcomes communications challenges that limit productivity by making it easy for all workers to see, at-at-glance, the company and team priorities, as well as who’s tackling what, and where bottlenecks are occurring.

Rather than having to call hour-long meetings to rehash the mission and check in with each member of the team—or sending group e-mails and waiting for a response before you can forge ahead—Social Goals simplifies company-wide communication around projects and eliminates productivity killers. Social Goals allows you to:

Connect your virtual workforce. Whether all your employees are under one roof or you have a combination of virtual workers, mobile workers and office workers, Social Goals offers a single collaborative interface that’s fun and easy to use.

Spark better work communication. Social Goals breaks through information silos and spurs communication between coworkers, teams and departments so there are no communication bottlenecks.

Always-on communication. With Social Goals, the workforce can connect anytime from anywhere on a Social Performance platform that makes it easy to update progress toward goals, recognize a coworker’s contribution or red flag a challenge that needs further discussion.

THE CROWDSOURCING FACTOR

Are you on the crowdsourcing bandwagon? If not, you may want to consider making a reservation. Revenues of businesses-focused crowdsourcing firms grew a whopping 74% between 2010 and 2011, according to market research firm Crowdsourcing.org.

But you don’t have to outsource your tasks to tap into the creative power of distributed knowledge and crowdsourcing. You can leverage the benefits of crowdsourcing—which at its root is a distributed problem-solving and production model—within your enterprise ranks.

Using Social Goals is like having a corporate offsite in real-time. Let’s face it: vision inspires, goals motivate and direction shapes goals for employee at every level.

Social Goals helps you crowdsource the best goals around your objectives that will support the focus of your organization with an intuitive Social Performance platform—and then lets your workforce create goals that support your focus. By empowering employees to create goals under a key focus, you are engaging the workforce and encouraging them to collaborate and innovate on the best strategies for executing any given mission.

The result: innovation—and a culture in which employee begin to glean insights on how to set and achieve the best goals and ultimately deliver results that matter most to your organization.

THE RESULTS-DRIVEN FACTOR

No matter what industry your company competes in, business success is ultimately about driving results—and so is Social Goals.

Social Goals offers executives, managers and employers a better way to work together by encouraging collaboration, communication, rapid feedback and recognition.

Social Goals is a key component in stimulating and building a results-driven culture because it helps foster a sense of shared vision, speeds decision making and accountability, and spurs innovation and continuous learning.

If you want to build a results-oriented work environment that helps you retain top talent by offering employees more autonomy and recognizing top performance, Social Goals offers tools that will engage the workforce at every level of the organization, from new hires that need onboarding to senior executives who want to keep a finger on the pulse of the company.

WHAT SOCIAL PERFORMANCE IS NOT

Now that we’re crystal clear on what Social Performance is and how it works, let’s take a moment to discuss what Social Performance is not:

• Social Performance is not employer led and controlled.
• Social Performance is not focused on KPIs alone.
• Social Performance is not based on subjective competencies.
• Social Performance is not SMART Goals.
• Social Performance is not built for just management.
• Social Performance is not private.

WHAT SOCIAL PERFORMANCE IS NOT

Ask yourself these questions: How will the next generation of employees work together? How are they already working together today? Can you see the shift underway as Gen Y makes its rise? Social Goals is about an evolution in learning and development through real-time collaboration.

• Social Goals trades employer-controlled systems for a coaching model.
• Social Goals looks at KPIs, but only as one component of the Social Performance system.
• Social Goals is about results-driven reviews versus subjective competency skills. Personal development is an objective, but goals are tied to personal development.
• Social Goals are public. Instead of a one-on-one manager employee annual meeting that fails to drive lasting engagement, most goals are public to engage workers around company objectives.

In the Social Goals model, you share work, collaborate with coworkers, learn continually—and your culture and team evolves into a results-driven, team-minded machine.

ANATOMY OF SOCIAL GOALS:
TOP DOWN VS. BOTTOM UP

As the workforce becomes more distributed—and as we become more social—Social Performance is a natural evolution of the traditional performance management model. At its core, Social Goals empowers your team to make better decisions on the way to completing goals. So let’s outline the skeleton of Social Goals.

The backbone of Social Goals is employee empowerment, and the nervous system is a bottom up (as opposed to top down) management system.

The classic top down management system pushes out sometimes overwhelming—and sometimes not enough—information on a project and then offers employees performance feedback six months or a year later. The problem with top down management is that decision-making is essentially centralized at the executive level while lower level employees become drones executing tasks. Engagement suffers.

By contrast, bottom up management works to involve lower level employees in decision making, innovation, and shaping goals around the company direction. A bottom up management approach empowers and engages employees, unlocks creative potential, and offers valuable feedback along the way that helps them develop stronger skills. Bottom up management doesn’t prevent managers from setting vision and mission or suggesting goals. It just makes most goals public and includes workers in the process.

ANATOMY OF SOCIAL GOALS:
GOALS ARE PUBLIC

If the backbone of Social Goals is empowerment, then brainpower of Social Goals comes through transparency. Eighty percent of goals are public in a Social Performance setting. By making most goals public, performance feedback is no longer a distant relationship between managers and employees and collaboration is no longer scattered across e-mail and instant messaging.

Making goals public across the entire organization offers the ultimate transparency, allowing every employee to follow the direction of their team and supporting teams.

In other words, the marketing team can follow the progress of the product development team’s goals—and even offer feedback at key stages based on new developments in demographics or direct feedback from focus groups.

Social Goals generates brainpower by creating a repository, of sorts, of information on any given objective. Anyone on the team or supporting teams can find the information they need about the status of a key priority with a few mouse clicks. Anyone on the team or supporting team can chime in on how to overcome challenges—or even foresee potential roadblocks before they arise—by tracking public goals. Anyone on the team can cheer coworkers on as they make progress.

ANATOMY OF SOCIAL GOALS:
SOCIAL SUPPORT

An Intranet with e-mail is no longer enough in a corporate world that is undergoing a rapid social shift. In fact, relying on e-mail to provide coworker support and foster collaboration can create more headaches.

The lifeblood of Social Goals is coworker support through an internal social network that revolves around goals—creating, sharing, suggesting and commenting on goals and building a community of recognition and encouragement.

By using Social Goals, employees are building their own coworker support network, including contributors to the work they are doing and coworkers who followed the outcomes of their last mission. Social Goals sets the stage for employees to receive feedback from coworkers, which is often more valuable than feedback from direct supervisors in the short-term.

All the while, Social Goals sets the stage for self-management and career management. Employees can see what adjustments they need to make to their own priorities in order to better align with the organization’s goals. Managers can also suggest goals to employees. Social Goals is the lifeline that runs from the bottom to the top—and from the top to the bottom—of a company.

ANATOMY OF SOCIAL GOALS: AGILITY

Goals and priorities shift, sometimes rapidly, and you need to shift with them. The muscle behind Social Goals is agility. Unlike traditional performance management platforms that are rolled out a couple of times a year or SMART goals that are rarely visited, Social Goals is designed to engage all employees around the vision, mission, direction, and focus of your team and organization.

With Social Goals, goals are agile and lightweight rather than rigid and long-term only. Employees should be able to move goals easily from various buckets, like “now,” “next,” or “someday,” while also supporting features for detailed goals with dates, categories, and metrics. The idea is to support both lightweight goals and complex measurements.

Rather than an annual top down heavy process, Social Goals allows organizations to pursue an Agile Performance model without sacrificing the business focus. Agile Goals assures employees can shift with priorities and features like Focus Tags, Notifications and Company Page Views help maintain a focus on the overall mission.

ANATOMY OF SOCIAL GOALS: FEEDBACK

The average length of a Social Goal is less than 29 days, but even with these short-term goals there is plenty going on that employees need to share—and there is plenty on which to give and receive feedback. You might call feedback the arms and legs of Social Goals, helping employees walk toward and embrace what is working—and make adjustments to what is not working.

Feedback fuels the engine of improvement—but with Social Goals it’s not necessary to wait for a formal performance review to get the feedback you need to drive incremental improvements in your organization. Feedback needs to be lightweight, results-based, and happen in real time—and Social Goals makes that possible by enabling quick replies to goal updates that are instantly logged on the platform.

With informal feedback from coworkers, users can adjust goals and reprioritize in real time. With Social Goals, feedback can be lightweight and results-driven based on an employee’s actual contributions to actual goals. With this model, even feedback becomes collaborative.

ANATOMY OF SOCIAL GOALS: PROFILES

The individual cells of Social Goals are profiles. You can create professional profiles for teams and individuals. Profile pages show the employee profile and some of the active goals they have been working on. From the moment a user signs in, they automatically begin creating a work portfolio that demonstrates their engagement with corporate objectives.

In essence, Profiles become the professional timeline of an employee’s work and a team’s results. Profiles motivate and incentivize employees to showcase their accomplishments for all to see. With Profiles, employees can also see how their work aligns to the team and overall organization focus.

Also from the Profile page, you can see a quick organizational chart that reveals the employees managers. Employees can update progress toward a goal, see which departments to which the goal is related, see comments on the goal and a status bar showing how much progress has been made toward the goal.

Profile pages make it easy for managers and coworkers to see, at a glance, what people are working on, offer quick feedback, and celebrate employee capabilities and accomplishments.

HOW SOCIAL GOALS WORKS: FEEDBACK

Social Goals is the ultimate real-time feedback-generating machine. Beyond public goals, employees can also mark goals “private” for a formal goal review from supervisors. Executives and managers can offer informal, public feedback on employee profiles. Managers can also use the employee’s WorkStory as the basis for a results-oriented (rather than subjective) view of an employees work portfolio.

A WorkStory is an intuitive view and archive of an employee’s success, real-time feedback on goals, and engagement with teams. The WorkStory helps employees validate the work they are doing as they are doing it. Employees can get insight into their career path and start seeing your job and organization differently as you build your WorkStory.

On the employee side, feedback can also be informal in the form of likes, social comments and recognition—and informal feedback is a catalyst for greater employee engagement. Practically speaking, Social Goals allows employees to create their own feedback loop in a Facebook-like setting. Employees can like one another’s goals, or goal updates, leave comments, ask questions or mark goals as helpful.

HOW SOCIAL GOALS WORKS: RECOGNITION

There is plenty of research that points to nonfinancial motivators as more effective than financial rewards for a job well done. Sure, employees ultimately want raises and promotions. But financial rewards are short-term motivators while a culture of recognition can spur long-term engagement.

Social Goals empowers real-time social recognition and, according to PollStream, a provider of interactive engagement and community building solutions, offers six key benefits:

1. Talent retention
2. Reinforces corporate culture
3. Fosters collaboration
4. Changes attitudes of senior execs
5. Streamlines processes
6. Inspires and energies employees

HOW SOCIAL GOALS WORKS: COMMUNICATION & COLLABORATION

Collaboration is a pillar of modern business. But let’s face it—there is a bona fide challenge with collaboration as we know it. Collaboration, even driven by sophisticated social collaboration tools, doesn’t necessarily help employees align with your business objectives. Social Goals can help.

Social Goals helps you drive measurable value from collaboration through sharing goals. It starts with a single employee, manager, or leader and goes viral as workers invite team members to track the goals they are trying to accomplish. By sharing goals with coworkers, employees build the support system they need through collaboration and feedback to reach the end line faster.

Indeed, sharing goals with coworkers and other teams drives collaboration with the end result in mind. Everyone understands the direction of other teams and sees the interdependencies. In short, Social Goals keeps everyone in rowing in the same direction for a common cause.

Some of the most successful HR execs and some of the fastest-growing brands agree: performance reviews don’t drive results. That’s because performance reviews and talent management platforms don’t drive communication and collaboration. Indeed, they can’t drive the level of communication and collaboration a 21st century corporate world demands.

Social Goals sets the stage for an agile workforce—and the platform works the way you do. Social goals engages the entire workforce on your focus, aligns teams on common objectives, and allows for transparency and goal-driven teamwork in real time no matter where employees are accomplishing the work.

THE AGILE MOVEMENT

It should be clearly noted that Social Performance is an enabler of the Agile Movement. Terms like Agile Goals and Agile Performance are emerging on the HR scene to help management better execute on corporate plans and measure the success of individual contributors to the cause.

Ask yourself these two questions (be honest):
• Do your company’s goals remain static?
• Or do they shift as new priorities emerge in the face of changing business conditions?

Today’s reality is that goals change—or at least get reprioritized—in response to new competitors, new innovations, and sometimes even new personnel.

Social Goals assures employees can shift with priorities. Features like Focus Tags, Notifications and Company Page Views help maintain a focus on the overall mission. Rather than an annual top down heavy process, Social Goals allows organizations to embrace the Agile Movement without sacrificing the business focus.

DRIVING EMPOWERMENT & ENGAGEMENT

At its most fundamental level, Social Performance is about employee empowerment and employee engagement. Employee empowerment and employee engagement aren’t one in the same—but employee empowerment is a vital component of employee engagement.

Employee empowerment is giving employees the autonomy to make decisions that are in the best interest of the company while employee engagement describes an employee’s passion and commitment for their work. Empowered employees are typically more engaged.

The Society for Human Resource Management’s 2011 Job Satisfaction and Engagement Report reveals that only 52 percent of employees feel engaged in their work—and only 53 percent say they enjoy going above and beyond what their jobs requires. The harsh reality is this: Employees won’t stay at jobs where they don’t feel empowered and engaged.

DRIVING AN EMPOWERMENT CULTURE

Since empowerment is a key component to engagement, savvy enterprises are working to foster an empowerment culture. Empowerment doesn’t mean handing the reigns of the company to employees. It means knowing when to let employees make decisions and self-manage and when to suggest goals toward a company focus.

Traditional performance management platforms feature a top down approach where managers set goals and define key results. Employees are locked in a box, unable and unmotivated to innovate or suggest better ways of doing things. This approach can actually slow down the goal creation engine—and the dampen results. Employees are stripped of power and struggle to engage at high levels. Eventually, most give up and move to another job.

Social Goals spins the paradigm 180 degrees. Managers set larger objectives and key performance indicators along the path to success, but employees develop the goals that will get take them there the fastest and with the highest quality. Social Goals is employee-oriented, employee-empowering and employee-engaging.

SOCIAL GOALS BREEDS SELF-MANAGEMENT

Good managers know how to delegate tasks to their employees.

Great managers let their employees self-manage. Employees who are empowered and engaged are more likely to manage their time in a way that drives stronger results. Managers still set the direction and focus, but self-managed employees come up with new ways to support the team or company mission because they are highly engaged.

Traditional performance management hinders self-management because there’s a massive communication gap between managers and employees. Employees aren’t empowered and even if they were, management has no way to make sure workers are staying aligned to the objectives.

Social Goals lets managers see the goals employees develop under a company focus in an intuitive user interface, then watch employee and team progress toward goals and offer advice, encouragement and support along the way to accomplishing the goal. With the fast-paced world of work, Social Goals gives management and employees transparency into company priorities as they shift—and makes it easier for them to see how they can contribute toward the end result.

A DAY IN HR’S LIFE WITH SOCIAL GOALS

Remember Adrian? Adrian felt empowered by Social Goals. Meanwhile, Yvonne, an HR manager, witnesses a rise in employee engagement with Social Goals. As she logs in to WorkSimple, Yvonne sees:

• Twelve employees gave her new company goal a “thumbs up.”
• Employees are offering feedback to each other.
• Collaboration between departments is active.
• The organization is focused and aligned to goals.
• The team is engaged on mission, vision and direction.
• The company overachieved on eight of 10 Focuses.
• Seventy-five percent of employees are actively tracking goals.
• The CEO gave her a high-five in the hallway.

HOW SOCIAL GOALS BENEFITS HR

Yvonne can take the pulse of the organization by paging through Social Goals, but what benefits does the HR department realize through social engagement? Yvonne notices several:

• She can pinpoint which locations and teams need attention.
• She sees turnover declining.
• She finds recruiting to their culture is easier.
• She can play a part in business alignment/objectives, something HR doesn’t often have a chance to do.
• She witnesses that if direction is clear, people will get behind it.
• She learns that people will collaborate around public goals.
• She discovers there’s a better way to improve performance than what she’s used in the past.
• She sees that employees have a voice, generate new ideas, and communicate and collaborate in a way not possible with traditional performance management solutions.
• She can visualize engagement, it has a pulse in WorkSimple.

A DAY IN THE CEO’S LIFE
WITH SOCIAL GOALS

Adrian feels empowered by Social Goals. Yvonne witnesses a rise in employee engagement with Social Goals. And Clive, the CEO, sees results. As Clive logs into WorkSimple, he can:

• Set a new company focus, such as expand into Europe
• See social goal activity on the vision, mission and direction in three different offices
• Realize that 99% of the work is aiming toward company Focuses
• Check in on the Seattle office to see that all teams are humming
• Congratulate Adrian on his latest accomplishment
• Like Yvonne’s latest company goal
• See that the development team is one of the most active in the company
• Hold a town hall and announce they outpaced revenue goals
• See managers spending more time coaching employees than merely delegating tasks
• Monitor the social engagement score, which is up 300%

HOW SOCIAL GOALS
BENEFITS THE CEO

The benefits of Social Goals to Adrian and Yvonne are clear. What benefits does Clive get from Social Goals? Before deploying Social Goals the team was not engaged, visibility was poor and results spotty. No that the team is aligned, Clive can see:

• An increasing focus on goals over the course of the year.
• Better communication with teams, coworkers and leadership.
• Specific contributions from individual workers toward the goals.
• Improved results from every team member.
• Innovation increases as employees have more visibility.
• The organization is more competitive and is able to respond faster to new demands in the market.
• An increasing percentage of employees are engaged around business focuses.

5 STEPS TO 100% EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Now that you can see the power—and the ripple effect—of Social Goals on employee engagement, you are ready to start making shifts to your culture that will breed greater levels of empowerment and engagement. Here are five steps to 100% employee engagement:

1. Set the focus.
2. Engage the team on what matters most.
3. Encourage and empower employees.
4. Collaborate, offer feedback and give recognition.
5. Celebrate success and fine tune for the future.

The first step to 100% employee engagement is to establish three things: vision, mission and direction. Social Goals helps you do all of the above through Focus Boards.

Focus Boards help employees and management clearly see all goals under a specific Focus and the social engagement around that Focus. It’s a lightweight means of setting direction for your company—visually—and coaching employees to create the right goals.

Think of Focus Boards as a hub for employees—and the Social Goals as spokes. Focus Boards help jumpstart goal creation and allow all team members to quickly view each Focus and its associated Social Goals.

Focus Boards serve as a guiding light, of sorts, for employees, helping them catch the vision and focus on the priorities at hand. Focus Boards help management monitor progress and identify challenges. But, most importantly, Focus Boards empower employees create goals on their own.

Focus Boards sets the stage for engagement, but that’s not the end all. In order to get engage the team on what matters most, encourage them to share goals publicly.

Once direction is clear, it’s easy for the team to suggest goals, make recommendations and offer feedback. Engaging the team on current priorities means making room for ultra-short-, short-term, and long-term goals aligned with the Focus.

Ultimately, Social Goals lets employees come up with creative ways to get to the end result by setting intermittent goals on the road to achievement. Along the journey, Social Goals keeps employees engaged by showcasing how they are contributing to focus areas.

Social Goals helps managers transition from task delegators to coaches. Part of that is encouraging and empowering employees to come up with goals that support the focus. As you coach employees:

• Recognize the results that really matter;
• Empower everyone to come up with new goals on specific objectives; and
• Allow employees to showcase goals that make an impact on team and company success.

The fourth step to 100% employee engagement is actually three interdependent activities: collaborate, offer feedback and give recognition. These are strongly tied together in the Social Performance paradigm. Practically speaking, it looks like this:

• Coworkers collaborate on goals
• Coworkers recognize one another in real-time, focusing on progress, achievements and results
• Coworkers offer real-time informal feedback along the journey from goal creation to completion
• Coworkers review results

The fifth and final step is a must. Celebrating success is vital to employee engagement. That means you don’t hold your celebration to the end results—you also celebrate progress toward the goal. And fine-tuning for the future sets you up for more success and more celebrations. Here’s how Social Goals helps you celebrate success and fine tune for the future:

• You can adjust the Focus depending on shifting priorities or changing parameters.
• You can see team and employee profile updates in real time.
• You can monitor the reputation of users.
• You can see the social impact is showcased.

EXERCISE: TEAM SELF-ASSESSMENT

PART 1

This exercise aims to help you access focus, engagement, meaning, purpose and communication. Rate how much you agree with each statement on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest rating.

1. My team’s and organization’s Focus is clear.
2. My team goals are updated in a timely manner.
3. My top performers can name team Focuses.
4. My bottom performers can name team Focuses.

If you scored 15-20, you likely have an engaged workforce. If you scored 12 or below, it’s time to consider a cultural shift.

PART 2

1. Does more than half of your team engage in company meetings?
2. Can people see how their work relates to the team andcompany Focus?
3. Do employees have autonomy in the work they do?
4. Do have a social strategy?
5. Do you communicate goals once a year or quarter?
6. Coworkers get company updates once a month?
7. Do you use spreadsheets and PowerPoint to communicate goals?
8. Are you sure every department is focused on the right priorities?
9. Do you have visibility into progress or work?

If you answered “no” to more than two of these questions, it’s time to consider a cultural shift.

CHOOSING A SOCIAL PERFORMANCE PLATFORM

Social Goals could be the solution you need to foster a goals-oriented, results-driven culture in your organization. Here are some questions to ask as you select a Social Performance vendor:

1. Is the Social Performance solution easy to implement?
2. Does the Social Performance platform help you onboard?
3. Does the Social Performance system help employees communicate more effectively?
4. Does the Social Performance platform drive engagement?
5. Is the Social Performance platform employee-centered?
6. Does the Social Performance platform help employees connect the dots?
7. Does the Social Performance platform support Agile Goals?
8. Does the Social Performance platform set the stage for formal and social feedback?
9. Does the Social Performance platform emphasize contributions and results?

Check out our paper “Guide to Social Performance: 10 Requirements for Building Your
Performance Culture in 2012 and Beyond” for a deeper dive on those nine considerations.

Visit us to sign up for the FREE version of WorkSimple’s Social Goals with full access to all core features at getworksimple.com.

Contact WorkSimple to get started at +1 (415) 671-4714 or email us.

About WorkSimple

WorkSimple’s Social Goals is a better way to share goals, work together, get and give feedback, and make everyone on the team shine. Individuals, small teams and large, global organizations alike use WorkSimple to put an end to bad performance reviews. WorkSimple is deployed in minutes, and is as easy to use as your favorite social network, so you and your coworkers can quickly start sharing goals, feedback, and recognition.