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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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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Rypple is focused on four main areas:

1. Recognition
2. Feedback
3. Coaching
4. Setting goals.

According to Debow, these activities help workers to stay motivated, focused and on track. When you first log into Rypple, you immediately see a familiar feed of activity from your team to get a quick overview of who is doing what and how they’re doing within your team. The power of Rypple, however, is what is happening deeper than the feed itself.

Let’s break Rypple down into its four parts:

Recognition

Rypple sets out to make feedback both more real-time and more fun. Yes, fun. Through Rypple, team members and managers alike are encouraged to give people recognition and thanks in a “bottom up” approach. Receiving this thanks can enhance a worker’s reputation, and — in a similar fashion to online games — team members can receive badges for things they’ve done well; those badges then show up on their profile.

Teams using Rypple can make their own badges, either from pre-loaded images or any other images they want to use. The customization of the badges gives them more shared meaning; badges can also be limited in availability to create scarcity.” You can even give badges to people outside your company or team. I’ll explore this “gamification of work” idea more in an upcoming post.

Feedback

Why wait six months to a year to find out how you’re doing? Rypple lets workers and managers ask for private, anonymous feedback on their work, on themselves, on processes or on the team. Questions can include a rating system as well.

Coaching

Great managers provide actionable feedback as well as  coaching, and Rypple gives people the tools to do both, helping them create relationships with workers — even remote workers — for regular mentoring interactions. In Rypple, people can create a private shared space with the person they’d like to connect with, in which they can interact one-on-one. They can set goals, attach actions to goals and share notes.

Setting Goals

In a team, goals should be set together, and using Rypple, you can set up social goals, including metrics so that they are clearly measurable. There is also a “Goal Explorer” feature available to premium Rypple subscribers, which lets a manager peruse goals, see who is working on what, when things are due, and access further details about each goal. By reviewing the Goal Explorer, a manager can get insights as to what the team thinks is important. Goals show up in a worker’s profile once they are completed: yet another reputation enhancer.

Starting a Rypple

Rypple isn’t meant to replace the software teams are already using, such as Basecamp, Salesforce or Yammer, but instead, is meant to provide an additional layer to better understand the people working with those products. If a company wishes to continue with traditional annual performance reviews, the entire record of a person’s participation and accomplishments with a company are archived in their profile, making for a more accurate and less painful process. The strength of Rypple, however, is through helping people improve their performance with the “micro-feedback” they receive on an ongoing basis.

The free version of Rypple comes with the badge tool, unlimited coaching and connections, unlimited questions for feedback, and goals. Premium members get the Goal Explorer, additional setup and integration support, and live phone support.

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While it might seem like unnecessary overhead, I still think it’s worth spending a few hours to think about your performance over the past year. At the very least, you should be thinking about your accomplishments, your strengths, and areas where you could improve. The format is less important than spending some time reflecting on your performance, but I liked the format we used a few years ago when I was at a major corporation. Each performance review had three main sections: “Accomplishments,” “Strengths” and “Areas for Improvement,” and each section was limited to about three items.

Accomplishments

This should include the three things you accomplished in 2009 that you’re the most proud of doing. You don’t need to list everything, but instead stay focused on the work that really showcases your skills.

Strengths

Your list of strengths should include the three things that you do particularly well. The benefit of listing your strengths is you make sure that you don’t let them slip while also getting warm fuzzy feelings for the things you do well.

Areas for Improvement

From my perspective, “Areas For Improvement” is the most important section. In this area, focus on those weaknesses that can be improved with some kind of development plan. For example, if you’re a life-long procrastinator, the chances of you becoming one of those people who finishes every task early might be an insurmountable hurdle, so you should try to focus on those skills that can be improved. Maybe you decide to focus on improving your design skills in 2010, for example. Again, this should only include a list of about three achievable areas for improvement.

Bonus: Reviews

If you want to really do a thorough job of reviewing your performance, you should send out a request for performance feedback to a few of the people who you’ve worked with in 2009. You should do everything possible to make it easy for people to send in their feedback by keeping the feedback form simple. Using the same format (“Accomplishments,” “Strengths” and “Areas for Improvement”) is a good way to keep it simple, while getting feedback that you can use. You can even use one of the many online survey tools (Celine looked at some options previously) if you think people would be more comfortable providing feedback in an anonymous setting.

Do you do performance reviews as a freelancer? What works well for you?

Photo by Flickr user _e.t used under Creative Commons.

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