Social Media and Performance Management

Posted by Adam Britten on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 | 3 Comments

Elizabeth Lupfer, Senior Manager in Global HR for Verizon, was featured in the October 2011 issue of HR magazine (online). In the article, Elizabeth discusses whether or not companies should integrate feedback collected from social media into performance evaluation and employee recognition.

She suggests that companies should treat social feedback no differently than information collected using other means. Moreover, she claims that companies should collect feedback from all social networks on which they have an established presence. Even if your company isn’t ready to use social feedback for evaluation, she claims that it should be used as a learning tool.

Elizabeth will be speaking at the Social Workplace Conference on 1 November in London.

Christopher

Thanks for posting this, my thoughts are whereas the transparency of social networking feedback may be a positive, the difficulty comes with the senstivity and weight you want to attach to some of the feedback. In a formal structured performance management process, you want to ensure that the reviewer is aware of the potential harm or good their views will impart as well as their irrevocable nature, social networking expands the reach of performance management and brings some interesting ROI, but I am far from convinced that many companies could safely manage such a useful interaction.
http://twitter.com/AdamBritten Adam Britten

Right. As you said, most companies probably aren’t exactly ready to integrate it into formal evaluation. I like Elizabeth’s comment about using it for recognition purposes. At my last job (social media for a large American clothing company) if a specific employee was mentioned in a positive manner on Twitter or Facebook, we would include that comment in our quarterly employee magazine. People loved opening the magazine that went out to thousands of employees nationwide and seeing personal praise.
http://www.crexia.com/salesforce-acquires-rypple-a-social-hr-platform Salesforce Acquires Rypple, a Social HR Platform

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