Thought that job performance review was tough enough? How about adding how much office influence you have into the mix. Performance evaluations may soon see this revolutionary shift, as companies begin to experiment with ways to measure employees’ influence within their organization based on successful engagement with co-workers via internal workgroups and social media communication tools. Salesforce.com, for one, is beginning to implement such a practice, says Fast Company:
Salesforce.com's Chatter system released a new feature this spring called Influencer. It purports to measure how influential you are within your company, by tabulating, for example, how your fellow workers respond to the items you post to your corporate social network. Senior director of Chatter product marketing Dave King says he's heard from CIOs, for example, that, when they have a new system to roll out, they'll look up who the most influential people are in various departments and bring them in for a briefing ahead of time, in the hopes they'll be able to evangelize the system to their peers.
Salesforce.com's CEO invited the top 20 “influencers” to an offsite executive retreat, even though some were just 22 or 23 years old. Yammer and NationalField, as well as other enterprise communication tool developers, are also looking into the idea. These companies want to ensure that people aren’t rewarded simply for "yammering," or "being noisy," but rather for their posts getting the most "likes," or being shared. David Chie, chief operating officer at Palo Alto Staffing, thinks it’s an interesting concept, albeit with important caveats. "Often in management, you're looking for people to champion an idea or product throughout your organization," Chie says. "If you could identify those who influence...it could be helpful." He added, however, that such a concept is not a slam dunk. "The problem is that people influence others in the workplace in many different ways that are not easy to measure," Chie says. "Some could also say that different generations have adapted to social communication with varying levels of engagement, so would this be fair to everyone?"
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