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The premise of these workplace-oriented social tools — things like Yammer, Socialcast and features and functions in IBM Sametime and Microsoft(msft) SharePoint, is that they help workgroups and departments work together better, know where everyone is, and cut down on phone- and e-mail tag.

Social networking products, especially instant messaging (IM), took the consumer world by storm a decade or so ago with millions of users downloading AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft IM clients to their PCs and phones. Many of those users brought IM into the office, where IT worried about security and compliance. That’s when IBM, Microsoft and others started coming up with enterprise-grade IM and other social tools. The problem is that the same sort of services people like to use with friends can be viewed as intrusive at work. The challenge for companies, which have high expectations for the communications efficiencies that these services can create, is to figure out how to make the enterprise versions as compelling as the consumer versions.

Salesforce.com joined the social networking party three years ago with Chatter, and Microsoft has been pushing SharePoint as a vehicle for social networking in a workplace context.

As Salesforce.com rolled out its integration of its Rypple social networking-oriented HR-management acquisition into its CRM and Chatter products, Microsoft’s SharePoint team was on the road touting research into what companies “really” want in enterprise social networking. A Microsoft spokeswoman said enterprise social networking will be a big area of investment for Microsoft in the coming months.

As is its habit, Microsoft attacks this market with a “platform” approach (as in, why buy plain old instant messaging when you can buy a big hunk of software?) — which puts workplace social interaction in the context of getting your job done.

Right now, a lot of the talk around social networking touches on “frothiness,” said Jared Spatero, senior director for SharePoint product management in an interview Wednesday.  ”The discourse is all about how feeds and follows will change your life. We think it’s about task completion, not stalking people and hearing about what they had for lunch,” he said.

Here are some highlights from Microsoft-funded research on enterprise social networking adoption plans conducted by Harris Interactive. The researcher surveyed 202 “business and IT decision makers” in companies with more than 1,000 employees. (Note: The respondents worked for companies that either have social networking in place or plan to implement it.)

• 65 percent of respondents believe it is “absolutely essential or extremely important” to involve their IT department in creating an enterprise social network.
• 57 percent are inclined to use a mixture of new and existing social software.
• 25 percent said they will leverage existing infrastructure.
• 18 percent will adopt new social software.
• 90 percent cited security as a top concern in rolling out social networking.
• 66 percent said integration with existing systems is a top concern.

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These are questions that John Wookey, Salesforce’s new executive vice president and a former exec at SAP and Oracle, must ponder often, as he is heading up the team behind recently acquired social performance management solution Rypple. The answer, Wookey recently told us in a wide-ranging discussion of tools for the future of work, is more social, less hierarchical systems.

More global, more agile

Likening the skeptical reaction among some execs to enterprise social solutions to the reluctance of higher ups in the early days of email, Wookey sees the adoption of tools that share information in a transparent and social way as inevitable. “I think they’ll look back and laugh. Why did it take so long to get there?” he says. Social tools, he argues, are simply better suited to the realities facing businesses today – namely, a need to be both global and agile. He explains:

More and more companies, even companies of fairly modest size, are almost immediately global. You don’t have people all sitting in the same room or the same building walking around. You have all these people spread all over the world, and customers and partners and so on that don’t always operate in your time zone, don’t operate in your geography. So you have to think about building this sort of virtual company and tools that support your ability to act seamlessly.

What excites me about these social networking tools is they provide a tremendous amount of freedom of movement of ideas and information. People know about different projects going on in the company. They have an ability to participate in those in some way if they’re of interest to them.

And it’s not just the geographic reach of the workforce that’s driving the need for easier information sharing and fewer bureaucratic hurdles between members of organizations. The increased mobility of workers within companies is also pushing organizations to find ways to knit together teams without relying on shared spaces or lengthy tenure:

The workforce itself is more dynamic, meaning it moves across projects more quickly, so you may be part of a work group for a period of time, but when a project comes to some logical breaking point, you may move on to another project. The ability to quickly align around goals and what you want to get done is important. These kind of tools not only support the more remote workforce, but also the more mobile workforce.

You see it at fast-moving companies like Facebook or LinkedIn. If you’re talking about, ‘what are you working on at Facebook?’ they’re, like, ‘well, I’m working at this now’ and six months before they were working on something different. One of the reasons Facebook liked Rypple so much is because, even though [employees] are moving around a lot in the company, they have a better sense of how what they do contributes. With more short-term roles, more project-focused roles, they still feel better connected to the mission of the company. Whereas you can go to more traditional companies where people have been in the same group for ten years, and they have no idea how what they do really helps the company at all.

New tools meet old realities

Wookey argues that a more agile and global business environment is demanding more social tools to help teams gel together quickly, but he concedes that traditionally structured companies sometimes struggle on a cultural level to adapt to these tools. “Implied in the idea of a social networking tools is this level of transparency and trust that has to be there across the company,” says Wookey. “In a lot of ways that becomes the biggest challenge for more established companies because it’s not their normal operating model.”

To illustrate the point he contrasts Salesforce’s transparent goal-setting process, where everyone from the CEO on down publishes drafts of their objectives for public comment, with traditional top-down goal setting, in which the board dictates the course for everybody, “and nobody in one big division knows what the heck anybody in another division is doing.” Those older operational models “have become increasingly stressed as companies get bigger, as they get more global and as the market moves faster,” says Wookey.

John Wookey

Social tools can collide with these entrenched ways of doing business, limiting their impact, but Wookey feels that changes in corporate culture and communication tools can create a virtuous feedback loop, with the tools nudging the culture to evolve and the evolving culture encouraging the uptake of the tools. Meanwhile, the need to attract the best talent may speed the process further, as the most talented workers demand certain tools from their employers.

“Social networking tools are not just about technology. I think they are also a bit of a litmus test,” says Wookey, noting the difficulty of recruiting engineering talent at the moment. “Employees are pretty smart today about asking what technology do you use. Are you a Microsoft shop? What kind of a shop are you? People ask that now. I think they’re going to start asking what kind of social networking tools do you use because, to them, it sort of describes the type of company that it is that they’re talking to, and they have a clear idea about what kind of company they’d like to work for.”

Breaking out the crystal ball

So, what future does Wookey predict for social tools? Unsurprisingly, considering where he’s chosen to work, he has an extremely bullish outlook:

I think over the next five years this will start sweeping through companies. In the same ways that Rypple has taken this model of social networking and how people work together as a fundamental design point and applied it to performance management systems, you’re going to see it apply to a lot of systems around companies, whether it’s the recruiting process or compensation or learning systems. I think it will eventually hit things like financial budgeting and planning systems, anything where the work is inherently social. Those systems will come under pretty rigorous review and everyone will say we really need a rethink on how these systems work because this is not how people work together. The systems are not reflecting the reality of what happens in our business, and I think clever companies will come forward with new solutions there that simply are better than the systems that exist in the marketplace today.

Does Wookey’s vision of the expansion and uptake of social tools convince you?

Images courtesy of Salesforce.

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Now Rypple is teaming up with much-buzzed-about company Spotify to reimagine all of that. The social performance management company (a Net:Work 2010 Future Ideas Lanchpad finalist) worked with the digital music firm to develop Social Goals 2.0, Rypple announced this morning. The platform’s new goal-setting capability is built on the objectives and key results (OKR) model developed by Intel and allows teams to set common goals, see what colleagues are working on and monitor how individuals’ efforts are impacting objectives.

It is also designed to be more user-friendly than existing goal-setting tools, says Rypple’s co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Debow. “Social Goals 2.0 is about delivering something managers and their teams will actually use day-to-day,” he says. That means more engagement and understanding of how specific tasks fit into overall strategy, even as that strategy evolves, according to Johan Persson, the organizational development manager at Spotify. “For a high-growth company like ours, things change quickly,” he commented. “Rypple enables us to be more transparent across the organization and keep our employees focused on what really matters.”

That’s good for the company, claims Rypple, but also good for the motivation of individual employees, who can see more easily how their work advances the company agenda. “We believe people want to make a meaningful contribution — not just spend their days doing useless busy work that doesn’t move the business forward,” says Debow. Rypple is hoping this new feature helps both organizations and team members track and appreciate that contribution.

Is keeping employees in the loop about how their work contributes to the company’s goals an issue at your organization?

Image courtesy of Rypple

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LiveOps and Rypple both make tools to help connect enterprises with workers. Both also provide analytics tools to measure the performance of the workers and the teams that are using those products. Providing feedback, more than anything else, is the best way to incentivize collaborative workers and enterprises to improve performance.

“Our focus is on performance,” said Sanjay Mathur, VP of Product Management at LiveOps. The goal is to determine if its agents know what they need to do, and to provide metrics to show how agents are doing against the team, how the team is doing and even how LiveOps and its agents are doing relative to those who are hired through other collaborative tools.

Maksim Ovsyannikov, VP of Product Management for Rypple, agreed. Rypple seeks to pass along feedback so workers can find out how they did and perform better the next time they’re used. Of course, he said later, it helps if you have clearly defined goals and expectations, as well as metrics in mind to measure performance.

The key to what makes these systems work is that potential collaborators are incentivized to respond positively and improve performance. “An agent’s reputation is very important,” Mathur said. “They can only get more work if they’ve proven they can get the job done.”

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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But he said companies are increasingly turning to gamification to accomplish a number of real world goals and they’re not simply turning everything into a game. They’re realizing that gamification, or the use of key game concepts to engage users and solve problems, can be a powerful way to create happiness and innovation and spur on results and education among its workforce, said Zichermann at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference.

The key, he said, is that our brains are wired to want to go through a process of desire to mastery. That process, which includes incentives, challenges, achievements and feedback, looks a lot like videos games, following a similar path. By tying into those mechanics, companies are able to tap into the higher desires of people, who often see work through the lens of self actualization and esteem. When companies employ game techniques and provides broad metrics tied to social interactions, it can motivate people in very significant ways, he said.

Zichermann said it can be simple like a checkout game for Target cashiers, who get audible feedback noting how their product scans are going. It takes a mundane and job and makes it a little more fun and gives workers a little more sense of control or agency in their lives, Zichermann said.

Other companies are looking to leverage feedback and use it to encourage people. Apps such as Rypple and DueProp are being used by companies to prompt more immediate feedback among employees, so workers can recognize each other in real time for the work they’re doing. Car companies are using feedback in their hybrid cars to encourage users to drive in a more eco-friendly way, showing them the results of their driving habits on screen through representations like a growing tree.

Zichermann said teamplay can also have a strong effect. He noted the experience of NextJump, an employee rewards provider, which now has more than 80 percent of its employees working out because of a new gamified health system that splits the workforce into teams and doles out cash to the teams that work out the most.

Zichermann said that it’s still hard to create the change that companies want to see internally but they’re increasingly seeing game mechanics as a way to accomplish their goals. He said a Gartner study found that 70 percent of the Global 2000 expect to use gamification by 2015 and 50 percent expect innovation to come from game processes.

“In order to get us to collectively create the major change we’re looking for, we need to design things in ways that are motivating and meaningful for people individually. Gamification gives you a toolkit to accomplish that,” Zichermann said.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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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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Yet earlier this year, when Google interviewed its employees about what they valued most at work, none of these extravagant benefits made the top of the list. Neither did salary. Instead, employees cited access to “even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”

Tangibles like salary and benefits aren’t enough to guarantee that your best and brightest creatives will remain engaged. Indeed, a recent landmark study by Arnold Worldwide of 3,000 employees and 500 executive leaders across a range of communication and advertising firms found that 30 percent of the advertising workforce say they’ll be gone from their job within 12 months.

Take Jill, an outstanding, experienced copy editor whom Agency X recently recruited at considerable expense from one of its chief rivals. Despite her outward success, she’s unsure how she’s performing, where she stands in the company, and how she fits into the overall goals of the agency. Her pay is great, she loves the Friday office happy hour, but over time, she finds herself feeling demotivated by the lack of communication, and checks out.

The loss of star performers like Jill doesn’t just leave a talent vacuum to fill; it also leaves a gaping hole in the bottom line. Indeed, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal calculated that it typically costs a company about half a position’s annual salary to recruit for that job ¾ and several times that if the position requires rare skills.

So how can your company keep its stars engaged? It comes down to creating a culture of communication — one in which employees know where the organization is headed, how they fit into these plans, and what’s expected of them. Here are a few key strategies your agency can employ to make this happen.

1. Create a culture of education

The average Starbucks barista gets more training in a year than the average employee in a communications company, according to the Arnold Worldwide study.

For employees, the single most important motivational factor was the ability to learn. Yet the study found a huge disconnect when it comes to perceptions about company training. While 90 percent of employees say they learn by figuring things out on their own, only 25 percent of executives think that employees learn independently.

To keep employees motivated, agencies need to build a culture of learning, where employees leave more enriched at the end of each day.

2. Provide regular, consistent feedback

Employee feedback is a critical part of the education process, and shouldn’t just be relegated to the annual review. To be effective, feedback needs to be specific and actionable. But that’s not always how it works.

In a study by Leadership IQ, 53 percent of employees said that when their boss praises excellent performance, the feedback does not provide enough useful information to help them repeat it. And 65 percent responded that when their boss criticizes poor performance, it doesn’t provide enough useful information to help them correct the issue.

Feedback, both positive and constructive, is most effective when given right away. Negative feedback given a month after the fact can lead to a passive-aggressive environment in which an employee feels powerless to act on the advice.

Think of it this way: no one wants to go a full day knowing their price tag was hanging from the back of their shirt, or the remnants of the salad they had for lunch were still stuck in their teeth. If an employee does something well, that activity should be encouraged. And if there’s room for improvement, they should be given the opportunity to learn for their next task.

3. Set time aside for weekly 1:1 meetings

At first, most employees and managers will cringe at the idea of yet another meeting. But instituting weekly 1:1 meetings can be the most important step you take to retaining your top performers.

In its quest to build a better boss, Google discovered that its worst managers weren’t consistent in their 1:1 meetings; some focused on meeting with people who were underperforming, while others met primarily with the top performers.

Consequently, Google implemented the best practice of 1:1 meetings with all team members.

These meetings can cover anything and everything from upcoming projects to the latest client news. With each week, discussions about goals, feedback, and concerns become a lot more natural unlike the awkward, starchy conversations during annual reviews. Over time, it becomes easier for both sides to raise potential problems and deal with them early on, before they fester into something destructive.

4. Manage the grunt work properly

Not every project is going to be awesome. That’s just the way business works. And chances are your employees understand this.

However, managers need to handle such projects responsibly and that means a few things. Boring projects should always be balanced with more stimulating work. Employees should always be told how any grunt works fits into the overall needs of the company (“If we do a good job on x, we’re hoping the client will give us their cool launch next year”). And specific parameters should always be set for the boring stuff ¾ meaning employees should always see light at the end of the tunnel.

5. Publicly acknowledge good work

All too often, managers see motivation in terms of financial compensation, but money is far from the only way to effectively reward talented employees. A 2009 survey by McKinsey Quarterly asked which incentives were the most effective in motivating employees. The top two responses were: “Praise and commendation from immediate manager” (67 percent), and “Attention from leaders” (62 percent).

Praise and commendation go a long way in making employees feel noticed and valued. And the impact of a pat on the back is multiplied when it’s done publicly. Through public commendations, employees not only feel the support and respect of their manager, but the entire organization as well (including top-level executives). Creating a framework for “social recognition” will encourage a culture of appreciation throughout your firm.

Keeping your rockstar employees on board has always been important, and don’t think that economic uncertainty will keep your employees around. Your company has worked hard to recruit some bright people and great talent; make sure an opaque work environment doesn’t drive them into the arms of your competition.

Learn more about how to keep remote workers happy and your team collaborating at GigaOM’s Net:Work event on December 8, 2011.

Daniel Debow is co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Esparta. 

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