March 17, 2010 5:30 PM

First ... no answers here.  Only questions and ideas based on past HR experience, observations and some familiarity with interactive and participative dynamics online. Back in January in one of the sections of a post titled "Exploring the HR Management Framework for Enterprise 2.0" I offered up the following:

Employee Performance

Performance management has been a hot-button issue in most enterprises for a long time.  At its best, a well-designed and disciplined approach to performance management can play a positive and constructive role in delivering sustained high performance, and can be central to creating a performance oriented culture in the enterprise.

All too often, however, performance management schemes serve to remind us that too many workplaces are the adult version of grade school, with report cards and a parent-like boss who has unwanted power over employee’s future and fate.

360-degree feedback processes (soliciting input on performance from subordinates, colleagues, superiors and even external customers and liaisons) have been around long enough now to have most of the kinks worked out, and are probably a decent pre-cursor to forms of ‘crowdsourcing’ input on employees’ performance.  Many (most ?) of the social computing / collaboration platforms out there have features and functionality designed to offer support to gathering and processing information about peoples’ performance.

The culture of an enterprise is an all-important aspect of why and how performance management is used.  I expect that this aspect will become more important as social computing and collaboration continue to grow and spread.

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Let's talk a little bit more about how managing peoples' performance might be practiced in an interconnected, interactive (and cross-silo / cross-organization) and more transparent organization.

Sharing information and building pertinent and applicable knowledge from that sharing is one of the core (and still much-discussed) tenets of knowledge management (KM) - the buzzword that won't go away.  Sharing information .. links, content, opinions, specific expertise, etc. ... is also at the core of using social computing in the enterprise.  Some of the skepticism about being able to control it comes from not understanding clearly how it will fit into, or with, existing business processes, and I suspect that there is an accompanying fear that it may upend or distort some or mamy business processes, if the inmates are handed the keys to the gates.

At the same time, we are at the back end of at least 20 years of calling for breaking down or at a minimum de-rigidifying the walls of specialized functional silos in most hierarchical organizations.

In some sense, the invaders, or the barbarians if you will, are at the castle gates clamoring for the gatekeepers to let them in.  They'll argue, with some reason, that customers have more power, and that empowered and trusted employess can and want to contribute more to any given organization's effectiveness.

So ... let's assume that Enterprise 2.0 implementations continue to spread and grow.  Let's further assume that many of them are at least semi-successful, and that net-working in collaboration with flows of information feeding increasing flexible business processes gains more and more traction.  Will we need to begin setting objectives and targets differently, and will that in turn necessitate that in a socially-networked or 'social business' environment employees' performance will need to be assessed and managed differently ?

My sense is that the answer is probably Yes.  People will be working differently, and in all likelihood in more interdependent ways than in more traditional teams.

Setting objectives, for example, will probably need to consider more the role and dynamics of the networks that are pertinent .. whether it involves greater connections to/with customers and markets, or to what purpose and degree the work that addresses the objective involves net-working inside the organization.  In other words, I think it will mean considering the nature of the work more than ever before.

Bring an organizational objective down into an individual net-worker's performance objectives will also require consideration of how she or he works in the relevant networks, and what kinds of contribution are generated from the interaction in which they engage with others in the network(s) that are addressing the organizational objective.

I believe that there are a range of work design tools that can be useful with these issues .. mainly drawn from the organizational development (OD) field, such as the RACI matrix and accountability mapping.  They would need to become more commonly and frequently used, and I suggest that they would become as or more important than the traditional job description, with its assumptions about relatively static tasks and accountabilities.

Competency models are the most recent work design tool (I've written briefly about them here) that has become embedded in most workplaces in support of recruitment, employee - performance fit and as a foundation for assessing individual performance.  I also believe that the competencies associated with most roles (and certainly those that operate mainly in networks and with social computing and social networking tools and platforms) will need to be re-visited as the cross-functional, cross-organizational and internal - external connections proliferate.

In terms of actually assessing performance against objectives and required / desired competencies, today's organizations have a foundation upon which to build.  Many organizations have implemented and have experience with using what is called 360-degree feedback as a core element or the input about demonstrated performance in a role or job.  The 360-degree feedback process can, I think, be reasonably well-adapted to the E2.0 context ... the more difficult challenge is articulating the performance objectives in clear and meaningful ways whilst acknowledging that the roles being performed are participating in a range of networks and flows of information and activities.

Additionally, most (if not all) E2.0 collaboration platforms have or will have mechanisms that track activities, whether around objectives or around issues using tags, click counts, and elements of social network analysis (SNA), organizational network analysis (ONA), or value network analysis (VNA).  As organizations acquire more experience and expertise in using these concepts, I think there will come to be a base of information that will enable new forms of ROI .. namely what I and others have called Return on Investment in Interaction (ROII).

Performance management in organizations has always been a complex set of sociological and political processes. It doesn't promise to become any easier, but there are signals on the horizon that suggest some wats forward.

Like I said .. no answers, just ideas and questions at this stage.  Beyond the ideas outlined above, there are more far-reaching ideas and issues being discussed in some of the conversation circles I inhabit that are examining more human-centered notions of knowledge work and how they may come together in new forms of organization. Those ideas and issues will no doubt continue to evolve as collaboration platforms and the Web continue to grow their impacts upon today's organization and the work that is carried out in those organizations.

I'd be really interested to hear what you think.

Originally posted on Wirearchy

Blogger Profile: Jon Husband

Jon Husband is a recognized expert on social media and the emerging digital workplace, and carries out research into business strategy, organizational structures and work design in the interconnected Knowledge Age. Jon has been a banker and a Senior Principal for Hay Management Consultants in Canada and the UK, specializing in organizational design and change initiatives for major Canadian and multinational companies. He co-founded a leading Web 2.0 software company, and delivers workshops for clients such as Athabasca University's Executive MBA program, The CIO Summit in Toronto, and the Banff Centre's Leading Innovation program. He writes several blogs about social media and the growing presence of the Web in business and our daily lives, and is an active speaker in Canada and internationally about the Web’s growing impact on enterprises.

Posted by Sue Ansell at March 17, 2010 5:30 PM

Categories: Web 2.0

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