“The business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. And we’ve entered a next-two-hours era. The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating–fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies–and our visibility about the future is declining. From the rise of Facebook to the fall of Blockbuster, from the downgrading of U.S. government debt to the resurgence of Brazil, predicting what will happen next has gotten exponentially harder. Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?” — Robert Safian, “This is Generation Flux”

In today’s agile work environment, there are also other questions we’re struggling with: Where are we headed? What are we focused on? What are we doing to make sure we have competitive advantage? How do I keep my team in-sync with all of these moving parts?

The enterprise shift toward all things social is undeniable. Chatter makes CRM social. Box.net makes documents social. Facebook makes marketing social. ZenDesk makes customer support social. Yammer makes communication social. It’s clear that social technologies have empowered the modern workforce, yet many organizations are still relying on old-fashioned performance management models to steer modern workers.

Some folks have suggested evolving performance management, tweaking the model to better suit today’s business environments. But I believe it’s time for an entirely new model: Social Goals. With Social Goals, any company can collaborate on goals to drive greater team productivity. Social Goals is revolutionizing goal setting and attainment with a transparent, interconnected approach to corporate goals and accountability.

So, now the question is: how do you get your employees on board and embracing social goals?

1. Start with a team that gets the big picture

When it comes down to it, your workforce needs to understand the mission and goal of not only the team, but also the organization. This is how they can understand that their collective efforts can help shift the direction of the company.

Each person on the team needs to understand the team and organization’s vision and identify how their efforts and job contribute to the overall vision.

Managers are tasked with not just setting the direction, but also encouraging and empowering co-workers to set goals that support the business objectives. To enhance engagement, you must develop a team of employees who can drive your organization forward. When employees engage in this process, it generates tremendous business momentum.

With this is mind, make sure the group or company’s goals and visions are set. There isn’t much chance of the team being highly successful if this isn’t a priority. At a minimum, the team needs to understand from the start:

• Direction and where you want you team to go
• Why their work matters in the bigger picture
• How they can make a positive impact

When your team gets where they are going and how they can help to reach the final destination, they have a real stake in the path it takes to get there.

2. Inspire from social conversation and collaboration

Once you have set the company vision, invite employees to collaborate in a positive environment where employees and managers can share goals that help them perform at the highest level. This helps everyone showcase their strengths that contribute to the goals and vision of the organization.

Conversations no longer just take place between leaders and managers, and managers and their employees. They happen in a collaborative way to help everyone understand the organization’s vision, and how their personal vision of success aligns to the business success.

Social goals are all about working collectively towards a common goal. So, as these are inherently collaborative, don’t deliver the goals on paper, via e-mail, or even on the phone. Instead, ask your employees to show how they can support your direction.

For example, if you’d like to gain 10 Enterprise Accounts in three months, ask for specific ways to achieve this goal — which basically gives them power and lets them lead.  In the same vein, make the time for feedback so they aren’t blindly moving towards a goal. Both of these inspire conversation, as well as helps the team move forward as a whole.

Essentially, the alignment all managers are looking for needs to be deep, clear, and to the point. Alignment should also be lightweight — set focus through a clear, simple description, no need for too many word or metrics. By helping individuals — as well as the team — develop meaning and purpose, you also help them understand how they can create work that matters.

3. Solicit help & ideas

As we mentioned, getting the input from your employees makes them feel connected to your overall mission, as well as the company. Remember that you are trying to engage the team to create lightweight alignment and agreement. By utilizing social goals, you help your workforce shape the goals that support the team mission.

Even if you have a small team in big company, it’s possible to embrace social goals because it’s inherently easier to interact and embrace the social process in a smaller group. Make sure the team gets not just the internal, but the external purpose, as well as encouraging them to come up with the overall direction. This ensures that they see the big picture and how their contributions can influence the direction of the company.

4. Realize that goals can be complemented by different skills

Every employee has a different strength. Some may be better at social media, some may be better at customer service, some may be better at accounting. As a manager, it’s your job to realize that many skills can be complemented to reach the overall goal, such as copywriting to help with social media.

These skills can also be measured and tracked to ensure proper progress, as well as better targeting later. When goals are better achieved because of more than one skill or more than one person, you can plan better for future objectives, while allowing your employees to share a collective goal.

5. Encourage the sharing progress

Social goals are all about sharing and collaborating. As a leader, it’s important to encourage the sharing process so your employees not only feel empowered, but also linked to the progress. By openly saying, “I made a difference in this project,” your employees will feel like they actually contributed and get due credit and recognition.

Platforms like WorkSimple make it easy to not only track progress, but praise those who are doing well. Ultimately, employees want to feel recognized for the work they do in real-time, not three months down the road during the dreaded performance review (did we mention we hate those?). By allowing them to share their milestones, keep tabs on their work, and giving them a thumbs up in real-time, you essentially connect the dots between your personal goals and the tactics it takes to get there.

6. Communicate updates consistently

Social goals ensures that everyone is communicating consistently so everyone knows where the organization is headed, and how their team and other teams are supporting this.
This helps remove any communication gaps, and all the negative impact that the lack of communication can create. By leveraging social goals to enhance your communication, you eliminate business conflict. This creates better team-to-team communication and ideation throughout your work space. No longer do employees have to wait for internal newsletters, daily calls, or town hall meetings. It helps every employee see and be part of the larger team — they  are able to share their own vision and values, celebrate every success, and recognize co-workers’ accomplishments associated with your results — ultimately fostering a positive workplace and culture.

What do you think? What are some other ways to ensure your employees embrace social goals?

The demands of the approach to work are changing quickly though, and distilled, here are what I believe to be the core heuristics of the new worker:

- Bootstrapping
- Autonomy
- Persistence

In more detail:

Bootstrapping: This is the strategy of using the minimum necessary resources to kickstart a project or venture. Improvisation and borrowing are also used to leverage all existing resources in different ways. The entrepreneur does not wait for optimal resourcing or data, they assume they will never have it. Movement is the key. Much can be sorted out later.

Autonomy: The entrepreneur worker is self determined. They do not wait to be told what to do. They seek out opportunities to serve others, provide value, and kickstart projects. Their ability to influence others is based on the tacit power of reputation and track record, not overt control.

Persistence: The entrepreneur worker is not ashamed of failed projects or mistakes. They are all learning experiences. The only failure, and greatest risk, is stasis. Standing still and not making decisions will result in failure to adapt and learn.

The workforce today is accustomed to extensive investment in a project or career (such as obtaining graduate education), is used to giving up autonomy, and still has a concept of failure if things don’t pan out as expected. You begin to see how much of tidal change has to occur before workers are used to an entrepreneurial model! Our education systems are completely lacking in preparing people for this reality. But that’s OK, because the best way to learn how to bootstrap is to bootstrap! As the model becomes more normalized, it will be easier to implement and follow the example of others.

As we move into this model more fully, management’s job is to allocate available resources to competing and supporting entrepreneurial projects, based on their alignment with company goals and general support. The exact level of risk will vary based on industry — clearly, in safety critical areas the implementation of a ‘bootstrap’ will be quite different than in the video games industry — but I still suggest that the working model will be conceptually similar.

What do you think? How do you see this shift affecting your company or workplace?

So, how can managers ensure employees are working on a level that produces results and represents a positive company? Check out these performance management tips for the modern worker:

1. See things through their eyes

Look at your organization through employee-colored glasses. Would you want to engage with your company’s goals? If not, try to change things around or at least make the process more appealing.

You can engage your employees—and encourage them to contribute to your culture—by fostering social interaction between individuals, teams and corporate goals. Are you employees using the their most important skills or are you handing them work that they can’t excel in or don’t enjoy?

2. Drive collaboration

It takes effort to get a group that includes on-site and virtual workers aligned with the organization’s goals, strategy, and direction as a whole. It is impossible when you are not communicating these. While most companies have a strategy, and of course they have lots of goals, but they rarely communicate these to the co-workers. Teams cannot drive forward without clear direction.

Without collaboration communicating goals, strategies, and updates, it puts too much responsibility on only leadership. This is typically one-way, such as PowerPoint or email by managers or leaders. But collaboration will help team link their work and goals to Focus, helping them make the decisions throughout the workday.

- Driving collaboration means helping every member of the team see what priorities and objectives other team members—and other departments—are actively engaged in.

- Today’s performance management models can’t take the pulse of an organization, but Social Goals can.

- Social Goals empowers every employee with the cross-organizational information they need to make judgment calls on agile goals.

- This ensures that the bigger picture is seen and that they can collaboratively contribute to the overall organizational goals.

3. Give real-time feedback

- When employees get real-time feedback from coworkers and managers about the ripple effect their work is having on the goals of interdependent departments, they begin to think more like executives.

- Social Goals empowers this mindset with collaborative tools that help them see all the moving parts. Without visibility, no one can self-manage.

- Giving real-time feedback also helps employees perform better–if they are going down the wrong path, you can correct them quickly. If they are getting things right, you can encourage them to keep performing at this level.

4. Break down goals and give them focus

Set direction and get their input. We are not trying to force alignment. We are attempting to help them show how they already align. It’s the assumption that your workers are already doing great work, but they need to shape their goals that will impact your direction.  When you allow them to provide input and create shorter goals, you will see greater agreement and engagement around your Focus.

- Breaking down larger goals into short-term goals drives focus, awareness, productivity and results.

- When goals need dates, try to set the timeline in weeks, not months. Most goals should be completed in less than 30 days.

- Create a focus and let employees create goals that align to company and team focus, as well as align existing goals to this focus.

5. Share and track goals

Once your vision is set, then we need to drive some accountability from every co-worker, manager, and team for that matter. This is critical to allowing employees to set goals vs. dump-trucking goals on them — and causing a revolution. They will be accountable where they can see how their work matters, when they understand when are they most successful, when they find meaning, purpose, and creativity in their workday.

- Enable faster decision-making and productivity improvements by empowering employees to share and track goals in real-time.

- Use collaborative tools like a goal activity stream, goal score reporting, and the ability to “Like” goals and offer recognition on results.

- Also use focus goals and boards to ensure objectives are aligned with company vision and on track.

What do you think? What other tips would you add?

To learn more, download the free eBook, Revolutionized: How Social Goals is Changing Traditional Performance.

Check out what WorkSimple’s Morgan Norman had to say about 360 reviews here.

Strategic Human Resources and Talent Management recently released their predictions for 2012, which included points such as employee engagement taking center stage, corporate training continuing to transform, and the movement within organizations to focus on career development.

Here at WorkSimple, we thought we’d make our own workforce predictions, and perhaps our own resolutions, for the new year. So, without further ado, here they are:

A true realization that performance reviews just don’t work

We’ve said it before: performance reviews aren’t effective. Not only do they take up a lot of time, but it’s also difficult to remember every single detail about every single employee. Instead, we see the workplace shifting to something that works the way they do: social goals.

1959: The first critique of performance reviews was published.

That’s right. Fifty-two years ago (in a time before iPhones), Rensis Likert wrote an article in the July 1959 issue of the Harvard Business Review critiquing the effectiveness of the performance appraisal. Likert writes: “Performance review interview, as a rule, are seriously deflating to the employee’s sense of worth.”

If something has gotten the skeptical eye for longer than most of us have been alive, then there might be something to it. Since Likert’s analysis, a veritable slew of negative articles, blog posts, and books run the gamut of skeptical to downright condemnation. Don’t believe me? Google “I hate performance reviews”.

55% of the U.S. workforce thinks that performance reviews are not accurate.

Nothing speaks louder than this 2011 statistic from Globoforce. Even though performance reviews exist in part to better the employee work experience, employees don’t think they work. In another survey by Cornerstone OnDemand, the number was a little better at 51 percent, but that’s still not a winner.

While the margin of error can have a huge impact on where the majority lies in this statistic, the overall result still isn’t great. When dealing with any group of people, approval from one out of two isn’t a groovy number to go by.

24% of workers dread their review more than anything else.

There are so many non-fun parts about work: working late, layoffs, broken air conditioners… It’s kind of amazing that out of all that, according to a 2011 survey by Globoforce, a quarter of workers consider annual reviews the worst.

Instilling fear in your work staff isn’t going to always bring the best results. Consider how stressed, preoccupied, and miserable your workers could be if they feel so strongly about the annual review.

30%: Improvement in companies that choose goals in performance management over “traditional” annual reviews.

In a 2011 Bersin survey, it was found that “Companies that revise and update goals quarterly generate more than 30 percent greater impact from their performance management processes than those which implement the old-fashioned annual review.”

That’s incredible. Companies that steer away from the annual review do a third better than their competition. While this statistic sounds more important for folks on the management side of things, consider this: employees are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to company successes and failures. No employee wants to be attached to a failing company (or even one that is simply not as successful as others). So, as a manager, you need to atone for this.

So, what’s the solution? How do you engage employees together on the company’s mission, direction, and vision?

Well, one key is to educate your team members on the work environment as a whole. After all, it’s not just about the manager and it’s not just about the employee. When you step back and make the goals of every department shared and known and when workers can see the impact they’re making, they become engaged. However, more specifically:

1. Socialize your goals
You might not have deployed Social Goals yet, but you can start this by sharing your weekly reports. By sharing them with your entire team, and other teams, everyone is kept up to speed.

2. Make progress public
Turn everyone on your team into a publisher. If you don’t have Social Goals, start with simple ways to publish your goals — e-mail, shared documents (Google or Box.net), internal platforms, etc.

3. Ask for feedback
Feedback is always important. However, it’s hard for people to give it unless they have a full picture on what going on. Solicit feedback from co-workers and other team members, ask how is this project or objective is impacting their success, and find out how you can work better together.

4. Celebrate the good work
We all do good work, but the challenge is we also forget who’s made a difference. Keep a record of this, whether it’s a quarterly or monthly board, a running list of who’s making strides, or a weekly e-mail noting positive progress.

5. Get ready for Social Goals
With Social Goals, it’s not an if, it’s a when. The fact is, Social Goals are going to happen. Every co-worker needs access to what the team or organization is focused on because it’s not only simple, but it also builds engagement and camaraderie.

So, be sure to investigate approaches to working better together and embracing Social Goals, such as using platforms like WorkSimple. This will help your team move forward and engage in not only their goals, but the goals of others, which benefits the organization as a whole.

What do you think? What’s your take on the four statistics above? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Realize your responsibility and own it

Knowing that the performance for small teams in big companies is almost more important than those who have more resources is a big deal — and as a manager, it’s important to be upfront with your team from the beginning. At the end of the day, it’s your responsibility as a leader to really guide your team to the laid out objects or pinpoints. Make it clear to your teammates that there needs to be a plan in place, formal or informal, and how you’re going to get from point A to point B. This way, they can work accordingly on a schedule or timeline.

Show your purpose and how you plan on getting there

Okay, so you’ve got a rough little outline or plan, which is great. But, you’re going to have to show your purpose and how you plan on getting there. How? First, as we mentioned, getting a proper team structure is ideal. More importantly though, you need structured social goals.

Let’s say your employee, James, had a pretty good track record in social media. In the past, he’s helped gain 500 Twitter followers in just a few weeks. By assigning James to a social media role, you put the best player towards optimum performance.

But, James could use help with copy writing, so you decide to pull in Kelly, who’s a writing machine. Both parties have the same objectives, just a different way (i.e. focus) of getting there, making the goal inherently social. Plus, it makes your employees feel pretty important because they have will have a real purpose.

Have some kind of measure of your performance

The key to showing you did a good job is measuring your performance and pinpointing how you reached those objectives along the way. This needs to be a management priority since you need to prove that you actually did something. As bad as it sounds, it’s easy for your team to become the victim because you’re small.

There’s a few ways to prove performance, from sharing weekly reports to e-mailing clients on overdrive. Want an easier way? Use platforms like WorkSimple which allow your team to measure and show their performance management.

So, when James reaches his goal of 700 followers, he can note this as it happens. When Kelly finishes writing those short blog posts for James, she can indicate that she got something done, which helps James, as well as the group and organization as a whole.

Let’s be honest. The future of performance, particularly for small teams in big companies, is social. By allowing your employees to share their progress, and indicate where they made a difference, you engage your team…while at the same time, measuring who did what. Further, you stop being viewed as the little guy, and start being viewed as the guy that can get things done and demands respect for it, which is ultimately the end goal.

What do you think? What tactics have worked for you when you were a small team part of a larger organization?

Once your team has signed up for WorkSimple, you’ll want to get started by creating your first goal. Social Goals are tasks that can realistically be accomplished within the next 30 to 60 days, and creating a goal can be done in just a few simple steps.

Read on to see what else Appvita.com had to say about WorkSimple.