Measuring An Employee's Worth? Consider Influence
Measuring An Employee's Worth? Consider Influence
Today, your performance review is based on things like sales numbers or number of goals met. Tomorrow, though, it could be based on something that until now has remained ephemeral: organizational influence.Salesforce.com‘s Chatter system released a new feature this spring called Influencer. It purports to measure how influential you are within your company, by tabulating, for example, how your fellow workers respond to the items you post to your corporate social network.It’s still a work in progress, senior director of Chatter product marketing Dave King tells Fast Company. But already companies are using it to help them run more smoothly. King says he’s heard from CIOs, for example, that, when they have a new system to roll out, they’ll look up who the most influential people are in various departments and bring them in for a briefing ahead of time, in the hopes they’ll be able to evangelize the system to their peers.At Salesforce.com itself, CEO Marc Benioff has invited the company’s top 20 influencers on Chatter to the retreat he hosts offsite for the company’s top executives. “Some were 22- or 23-year-old engineers,” King says, “and we put them on stage for a couple minutes each to talk about innovation and what we as a company should be doing.”Chatter, which was launched two years ago, is not the only company working on a metric for influence within organizations. Yammer and National Field, other enterprise social networking tools, are also taking a stab at the problem.