In performance management, a team agrees on a goal and works together efficiently to accomplish that goal. There are many flavors of how teams get to be efficient, and my focus has always been on these few things:
– Know what the goal is, and why.
– Be able to prioritize. Do what’s most important first. Triage tasks you can’t do right now.
– Maximize team cohesion. A team that can work together accomplishes more with less friction. This is not groupthink, it’s just a form of respecting each other’s contributions.
Keystone Accountability believes that giving and getting feedback is essential for performance management.
Keystone has been using Slack, as our primary means of communication, for about 18 months now. Early on, I wrote a custom script that lets any user see a summary of who is being acknowledged for doing good work on a leaderboard.
/accolades
At first I thought that being at the top of the leaderboard meant the person was being recognized most. But later, I realized this might be actually be a burnout meter. They were being acknowledged because they were required to do extra work to keep the project on track. Not everyone on a team contributes equally to the goal. Those that are pulling the most weight tend to move up the leaderboard.
Other software packages like 7geese provide this recognition and feedback system to companies. But I prefer this one. It’s radically simple. Just chat with the people you’re already chatting with, and it will track your sentiments heuristically. It’s also an example of designing for interoperability. The tool lives inside Slack, and uses existing data from Slack to measure something important about the team. I’ve also prototyped a similar tool around gmail. Good tools disappear into your work flow.
Lately, this tool has taken on a life of its own. I knew it was a success when one of my colleagues wrote, in Slack of course,
That’s ownership. People like using it. For what, I don’t know. All I care about is that the data is accurate and reliable, and easy to find. We use the same approach with Constituent Voice™, our methodology for helping organizations systematically listen and learn from feedback, try to make it disappear into an organization’s work flow, so that it is easy to build around. When a tool is both easy to use and valuable it is no problem to get people to adopt it.
Bonus: Time Doctor (a slack add on) offers this longer guide for good time management on Slack