In a taxonomically organized world human resources are managed with structured approach: organizational graph, job role, job description, hierarchical or functional controls.
In every day activity people in social tools enabled enterprise environment people send mail, use wikis, post blog posts, online chats, virtual meeting, set shared calendar etc.
Social Network Analysis tool enable the analysis of what’s going on in the company work flow but is something that:
- Is used by within organization teams and consultants to make analysis that often drives to traditional organizational actions.
- Often seen by personnel as an unfair work control methods
So what happens using SNA is that the outcome is really interesting and sometimes surprising but not directly come to action for change.
Making (haking) SNA tool measures (over time day, month, year number of email sent / received by workgroup, number of social interaction as of posts, comments, wiki update, etc) become standard measure and tracking of PERSONAL activity and VISIBLE to each company employee on the personal page on the intranet with the possibility to make analytics analysis on it could:
- allow them to be aware on how they perform the work compared to peers or themselves overtime in order to make them (ad es. low performers) understand how to better allocate their time and effort to succeed
- spontaneous change of behaviors that are in violation of company policies (even if numbers are not controlled at personal level)
- establish a general confidence in the usage and knowledge of this measures within all the company people.
Furthermore the company managers looking at aggregated data for their team (organizationally defined or virtually defined by working connection) can so use this analytics to measure volumes of activity related to different process (e.g. effort on Quality procedures) and compare company performance and behaviors between teams.
Social communication obviously takes place in a lot of different ways than just via email. But actually your proposal should get easier as social networking systems allow SNA over all forms of communication whether these be mail, status updates or whatever. So I do think this type of approach will become more important.
However, it's important to introduce any new system like this into performance assessment carefully, otherwise organisations run the risk of encouraging their people to spend more time communicating than is appropriate which might detract from organisational performance.
So it should only ever be one element of performance assessment, and should ideally be a tool for development before it is incorporated for assessment. I think you will find that this, rather that it being seen as unfair, is why Personnel is cautious about it.
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People in organization spent most of the time communicating (or interacting), with mails, in meetings, conf call etc. How much they spent in communicating and how this affect organizational performance is not measured.
The decision to incentivate or not this communication / interaction focus is a decision related to the different jobs setting the propere average expected level or the peer average level as a reference.
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I like the idea of providing making SNA results a personal tool to improve personal workplace productivity and effectiveness. It will be similar to bio-feedback and can help change social behavioral patterns in a measurable way. But it should be confidential.
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