Books like Performance
Appraisal Phrase Book abound to help managers capture the best words
that describe an employee’s organizational contributions and personal
challenges. With all these available resources, then, why do so many
supervisors tell me that the employee performance review is the document they
most dread writing?
Eric Mosley’s The Crowd Sourced Performance Review has a reasonable answer to that question and an innovative solution to the problem. It’s not so much that writing the performance review is hard because of its linguistic biases, generalities, inaccuracies, limitations, and redundancies. In fact, those major annoyances are the symptoms, not the cause, of the problem with traditional performance reviews. At its heart, insists Mosley, the evaluation system itself makes little sense.
Eric Mosley’s The Crowd Sourced Performance Review has a reasonable answer to that question and an innovative solution to the problem. It’s not so much that writing the performance review is hard because of its linguistic biases, generalities, inaccuracies, limitations, and redundancies. In fact, those major annoyances are the symptoms, not the cause, of the problem with traditional performance reviews. At its heart, insists Mosley, the evaluation system itself makes little sense.
Lessons
learned from social media suggest that there’s a better way. While tweeting protesters
during the Arab Spring of 2011 and uprising in Turkey of 2013 make the most
headlines, multinational corporations and smaller businesses alike have long
used social networking platforms to get out their brand to the world. The
consensus is that through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the like, companies can
tap into the wisdom of crowds and increase their brand recognition, bottom
line, and community goodwill.
Mosley reports
that some companies have begun to see the value of internal social networking in
their performance reviews. By “crowdsourcing,” management can get insights from
an employee’s colleagues, thereby eliminating the single source of opinion, the
employee’s manager, which has been at the heart of the traditional system since
its inception. A diversity of opinion and a greater range of assessment areas should
result in a more accurate, comprehensive, and worthwhile employee review.
The author
painstakingly covers the undeniable flaws of the traditional review system
through numerous examples from the corporate world. He also shows how
crowdsourcing currently works and how it can be folded into any organization
serious about its employee development program. Skeptics may claim that
crowdsourcing might amount to nothing more than a popularity contest, but The
Crowd Sourced Performance Review recommends several safeguards against
that scenario and concludes quite practically that crowdsourcing be used in tandem with the traditional system.
With the technology
available for providing key insights in revolutionizing a long-broken evaluation
system, crowdsourcing is positively worth serious consideration. This book lays
out a clear blueprint to get started.
