What is a crowd-sourcing performance review?
In HR and performance management, crowd-sourcing is about bringing in the voice and input of all people across the organization. The main mechanism for this is social recognition, a simple set of practices by which many people consider and recognize an employee’s performance on a daily basis. This is done on a shared technological platform, similar to the Web but privately managed within an organization. Social recognition data is based on multiple sources of positive, unforced feedback that is generated in real time. The result is a more accurate view into true employee performance.
Why do you believe the prototypical annual performance review is so archaic?
The traditional annual performance review remains frozen in time. There have been revolutions in knowledge and information management over the past 50 years, but areas within human resources, like performance reviews, have changed surprisingly little. Crowd-sourcing has fundamentally changed the perception of value in the business world today. Incorporating this technology and approach to performance reviews via social recognition gives HR leaders the data they need to more accurately measure employee performance.
What new benefits does a crowd-sourced performance review offer?
One of the weaknesses of the traditional annual performance review is that it focuses on one manager’s opinion about one employee and ignores the collective wisdom of the wider community. One manager simply cannot see an employee’s total activities. Multiple people, however, can collectively produce a more accurate and nuanced picture. By crowd-sourcing ongoing feedback and recognition, HR leaders can gain a clearer, more holistic view of an employee’s performance.
How does the traditional review hold people back from achieving their potential?
Performance reviews should reward good performance and stimulate under-performing employees to improve. Unfortunately, the traditional performance review has the opposite effect, creating mistrust, anxiety and even depression. The goal of a review is to motivate, not the other way around. But crowd-sourcing feedback via social recognition brings the voice and wisdom of the whole crowd to the traditional performance review process. It brings more insight into how employees perform and how their contributions are valued by the entire company.
Many employees consider performance reviews a waste of time. Can performance reviews in general be valuable?
Yes. The traditional performance review brings formality and structure, as well as a nice cadence to the interaction between management and employees. If there is little crowd-sourced data about performance — for example, with a remote employee, the traditional review acts as a safety net so he or she has at least some feedback. The genius is in the middle — combining one-time, formal reviews and informal, frequent recognition. As the crowd-sourced performance review and the traditional review harmonize, performance management really takes off.
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s this a practice that you envision HR directors to embrace with open arms, or will it be a struggle for it to be integrated into regular officepolicy?
With any new system, there is inevitably a period of learning and adoption. It’s important for HR leaders to ask themselves, ‘What is the return on investment?’ If a new review system brings higher levels of engagement, which in turn brings higher level of corporate performance, it’s worth the investment.