I went to the South Bay Organizational Development Network’s monthly meeting last night in San Jose. The topic was Accessible Dashboards and Employee Recognition and the speaker, Lynn Hunsaker, talked quite a bit about how social media and new media tools are having an impact on employees’ expectations around their own performance evaluations—both in terms of process and communication mediums. Employees are starting to demand two-way real-time communication to improve the integrity and results of their performance evaluations. Lynn talked about how group recognition, especially in a social media-enabled environment, can both improve the accuracy of performance evaluations and reduce the appearance of favoritism, something that so-often clouds event the best performance management process. She mentioned a couple of the tactics I talked about in my post on Smart ways to use Social Media tools. Specifically, teams can recognize themselves and each other using public forums like blogs. And, wiki platforms are a great tool for managers and employees to co-author and maintain performance evaluations.
If you’re in the San Jose area, it is definitely worth checking out SBODN, an “informal forum focused on making a difference in how organizations and the people in them survive and thrive.” They have monthly programs for OD/HR pros for just $10. Thanks to the directors, Rossella Derickson and Krista Henley, for announcing the Toolkit pilot as well!