Lee Romero

Community of Practice Metrics and Membership, Part 5 – Performance Management

My recent posts have been quite long and detailed with examples in terms of how we have been able to understand and analyze community membership and activity for our community of practice initiative. This post is less focused on numbers and more focused on a particular use of this data in a more strategic manner.

Performance Management

Within my employer, we have a (probably pretty typical) performance management program intended to address both career development (a long term view – “what do you want to be when you grow up?”) and also performance (the shorter term view – “what have you done for me lately?”)

We also have an employee management portal (embedded in the larger intranet) where an employee could manage details about their job, work, etc., including recording their development goals (and efforts) and performance (objectives and work to achieve those).  Managers have a view of this that allows them to see their employees’ data.

Communities and Performance Management

As we worked to drive the communities initiative and adoption of communities of practice as a part of the corporate culture, one of the questions that commonly came up was, “How do these communities contribute to my performance? How can I communicate that to my manager?” That could be asked from the perspective of career development (how can my involvement in communities help me grow?) and also for performance (if I am involved in a community, how does it help me achieve my objectives that are used to measure my performance?)

These are all pretty easily answered, but in an objective sense, we found that managers had a challenge in talking with their employees about their involvement in communities and that part of that challenge was that managers did not necessarily “see” their employee’s community involvement (if they were not part of the same community).

Given that we now had our definition of a community member is and also what an active community member is, it seemed like we could provide some insight to managers from this data and embed that in the employee management portal.

As we were working through this, we found that there was going to be a new component added to the employee management portal labeled “My involvement”, which was intended to capture and display information about how the employee has been involved in the company at large – things like formal recognition they’ve received or recognition they’ve given to others (as part of our employee recognition program) or other ways in which they’ve been “involved”.

This seemed like a perfectly natural place in which we can expose insights to employees and their managers about an employee’s involvement in communities of practice!

So we had a place and the data – it became a simple matter of getting an enhancement into the queue for the employee management portal to expose the data there. It took a few months, but we managed to do that and now employees can view their own involvement and managers can view their employees’ involvement in our communities. The screenshot below shows the part of the employee management portal where an employee or manager can see this view (as with other images, I’ve obscured some of the details a bit here):

Community Involvement in Employee Management Portal

The Value?

So, what has been the value of this exposure? How has it been used?

While this helps to make some of the conversations between manager and employee about community involvement a bit more concrete, we do recognize that this is still a very partial picture of that involvement. There are many ways in which an employee can be involved in and add value to and learn from a community that goes beyond this simplistic data. (I’ll write more about this “partial picture” issue in a future post.)

That being said, providing this insight to managers has proved very valuable to engender discussions between a manager and an employee about the employee’s community involvement – what they have learned (how it has effected their career development) and also how it might have contributed to their performance. This discussion, by itself, has helped employees demonstrate their growth and value in ways that otherwise could have been a challenge.

For managers, this gives them insight into value their employees provide that otherwise would have been difficult to “see”.

For the community of practice program, this type of visibility has had an ancillary effect of encouraging more people to join communities as I suspect (though can not quantify) that some managers will ask employees about the communities of which they are a member and (more importantly in this regard) the ones in which they are not a member (but which they might be, either by work focus or interest).

Overall, simply including this insight builds an organizational expectation of involvement.