For social performance management product Rypple, 2011 has been a pretty good year. ”We’ve doubled in size in the last six months in terms of our headcount, which sort of tells you how things are going business-wise,” Nick Stein, director, content and media at Rypple, told WWD in an interview.

Things have been moving along briskly on the product side as well, with the company introducing a raft of new features. “Rypple as a platform looks completely different than it did a year ago,” says Stein, and the company’s star customer, Facebook, is behind one major change, dubbed ‘Loops’ by Rypple. The feature utilizes the platform’s social-media like “feed” of recognition and feedback to generate a quick, effortless alternative to the much-loathed yearly performance review:

Loops, we actually developed specifically for Facebook. We launched it over the summer and all of their employees worldwide now use it every six months when they do their performance process. So rather than having to shut the whole company down and write essays about each other, everything they’ve been collecting between their review cycles – all of the recognition, all of the feedback – is now already in Rypple, so that when it comes to time to run a feedback loop they can do it very quickly and easily.

Rypple has also added a goals feature that lets employees collaboratively set then follow goals, showing individual workers how their specific tasks contribute to the larger aims of the company. Stein explains:

Rather than a traditional goal setting process that happens from the top, and then people who are lower down within the organization on the food chain don’t really understand how these lofty goals apply to them and how their daily work has an effect on them, now these are things that you join.

In addition to improving their product, Rypple has also added a bunch of talented new executives to strengthen their team, including a new CTO and VP of product management. Stein also foresees 2012 being a great year for attracting more big companies to the product.

“The biggest shift that we’ve seen in our business is the size of the companies that are coming to Rypple,” says Stein. “Larger and larger enterprises and even more traditional enterprises are coming to Rypple.”

Things are looking up for 2012 for last year’s Launchpad finalist.

Image courtesy of Rypple.

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Although tight ties between performance and feedback are important, the two are often separated by the realities of organizational life. “Annual reviews rely on hazy recall, with managers remembering recent events and overlooking what was done earlier in a review cycle,” says Stanford Professor and organizational expert, Jeff Pfeffer.

Similarly, though with more colorful language, past CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz says,

I have the puppy theory. When the puppy pees on the carpet, you say something right then because you don’t say six months later, “Remember that day, January 12th, when you peed on the carpet?” That doesn’t make any sense. “This is what’s on my mind. This is quick feedback.” And then I’m on to the next thing.

Our product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter — putting more pressure on how quickly we can form teams and work effectively in and across teams. At the same time, team members are often working apart or on-the-go. In order to give effective feedback in this environment, managers need support, and performance management platforms, such as Rypple, aim to help.

In the most adept teams, members know who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate as a result. Rypple’s mobile capabilities mean that feedback can be given and received in ways that parallel the stream of daily work.

Rypple also helps make goal setting a living process, rather than an annual consideration. After an individual or team goal is set, other people can be invited to track the goal. Progress can also be monitored publicly, adding further accountability.

When I talked with Daniel Debow, co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, he said that Rypple replicates common online behavior. People regularly check spaces like Facebook to update their activities and see what others are saying. Rypple “harnessed what was already happening,” he said.

Rypple supports “a desire to do what we already know is common sense,” Debow said. He also noted that managers should coach people every week or two, update goals, and recognize performance immediately.

In the weeks since the call, I’ve noticed additional cases highlighting the wisdom of speeding-up and socializing feedback.

For example, I went back to reports that Zappos had done away with annual performance reviews. In a presentation on their membership-required ZapposInsights site, they say that they found annual reviews unproductive. “Nobody wants to give them or receive them…If everyone is always in open communication, then annual reviews are redundant and not very useful at all.” Zappos does use a culture assessment as a feedback tool, but they are careful to say that this is not a substitute for annual performance reviews. Given the company’s open communication style, annual reviews just don’t have a place.

“A recession is a good time for managers to focus more on evidence and less on received wisdom or old habits. Asking hard questions about performance management would be a good place to start,” says Jeff Pfeffer. In my opinion, we have an opportunity to improve performance management in modern organizations. The people are ready. The technology is ready. Our organizations should be ready.

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Here are a few ways to ensure you can demonstrate your value to the company, whether you’re a freelancer being evaluated or a full-time, web-working employee preparing for an annual performance review.

1. Keep good records. I spend a few minutes at the end of every day to document in a work diary the top few things that I accomplished or worked on that day. I’ve been doing this for most of my career, and it’s a great excuse to reflect on my productivity for the day, in addition to providing me with a reminder of what I worked on in any given month or year. You could also do monthly status reports, internal blog posts or use some other form of documentation. The format isn’t as important as making sure you have some kind of ongoing record of your performance.
2. Demonstrate your expertise. Everyone is an expert in something, and demonstrating your expertise is one good way to stay top of mind, especially when you work remotely some or all of the time. In my current position, I’m focused on open-source online communities, and people I work with come to me with all kinds of questions on this topic. I try to document best practices to help people find the information they need to be successful, but I also make time to sit down with people to answer questions and provide suggestions for how they can work within the open source community. People come to me for help, not just because of my job title, but because I’m willing to explain and help them work through their difficulties in a way that makes all of us more productive.
3. Learn new skills. For most of us working online, technologies change every day, and while we don’t need to jump on every hot new thing, we do need to take the time to learn new skills and techniques. If we don’t learn about new technologies, we’ll find ourselves becoming obsolete and irrelevant. You can’t perform well if you don’t have the right skills. Whether you learn these new technologies by going to classes or just jumping in and learning on the job isn’t important, but you need to set aside some time for development.
4. Brag to your manager. Yes, I know your parents probably told you not to toot your own horn and that you shouldn’t brag about your accomplishments. But you spend at least 40 hours a week (probably more) working very hard on your job, and your manager probably sees only a couple of things you do every week, especially if you work remotely. It’s your job to make sure your manager knows about all the important things you do, and the only way to make sure she knows is by telling her. Make the time to meet with her or send her a quick email when you finish something that you are proud of accomplishing.
5. Emphasize the benefits of working remotely. When working remotely, it’s also important to talk about how working remotely impacts your performance and use it to your advantage. In my case, I drive to the office two or three days a week on the days that I have a lot of meetings, and I make sure that I use that time to track people down who aren’t responding to email, and I make the most of my time in the office for in-person collaboration. On the other hand, for my days working from home, I focus on activities that require quiet and concentration, like strategic thinking, data analysis or writing projects. I’m careful to schedule my time and structure my to-do list to take advantage of each location, but I also talk about why this works with my manager, employees and coworkers to give them some insight into why I work the way I do and why it works so well for me.

The bottom line is that you manage your own performance, and you need to make sure that you are getting credit for your hard work, especially if you are working remotely.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Roman Pinzon-Soto

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