New visual tools leverage crowdsourced recognition for actionable insight on employee performance and culture

Globoforce, the world’s leading provider of employee recognition solutions, today announced Talent Maps, the industry’s first and only solution that connects employee recognition data with employee performance data. The new tool helps HR and business leaders more effectively manage their talent and culture by leveraging crowdsourced recognition and feedback. With this new level of insight, managers finally have the ongoing data to fill the void in traditional performance reviews.

Annual performance reviews have long come under criticism for their infrequency and single viewpoint about employee performance. With Talent Maps, business and HR leaders now have an easier, more effective way to evaluate their global talent. Through data populated by peer-to-peer recognition across the company, HR and business leaders can see firsthand who the top performers and influencers are within teams, departments, and the company. This knowledge and data can be used to identify high potential, high performance individuals for succession planning, flight risk assessment, and leadership development. In addition, managers gain actionable data for more effective day-to-day team management and individual performance assessment.

“Social recognition is the next big disruptor within HR,” said Grant Beckett, vice president of product for Globoforce. “Its high levels of adoption across an entire workforce make it the ideal way to evaluate employee performance and influence. With Talent Maps, we take this crowdsourced feedback data and plot it against performance appraisal ratings. Combining these two data points delivers a level of insight about a company’s talent that has never been available in an HR system before.”

According to Gartner’s recent report, 2012 Strategic Road Map for Employee Performance Management, social recognition programmes can help improve performance while decreasing reliance solely on manager and executive feedback. In the report, Gartner Managing Vice President Jim Holincheck writes that “Leading organisations will start to move toward more bottom-up feedback, recognition and rewards.” Managers can see the level of frequency of recognition and performance feedback for individual employees. As a result, “Senior executives can use this data to see if manager performance decisions align with what co-workers indicate through their actions.”

“Our recognition programme with Globoforce is one of the critical programmes we use to drive employee engagement and elevate business performance,” said Amy Montefinese, vice president, global total rewards and human resources operations at Premier Farnell. “Now, we will have a way to translate our recognition awards into actionable data to ensure our top performers and high potential employees are being recognised. By aligning recognition awards against performance review ratings, we will also be able to ensure our pay for performance philosophy is consistently executed across our global business.”

With Globoforce’s Talent Maps, HR and business leaders can also:
• Assess company and individual department alignment to company values, showing how “everyday” behaviours impact business and cultural goals
• Provide managers with an easy-to-use tool that visually maps out individual and team performance while highlighting hidden talent
• Leverage the data from ongoing social recognition programmes to show which employees are driving the business forward

Below is a sample of commentary from the HR analyst community about this launch:

“HR leaders have long needed a better way to understand the true performance of individual employees and teams. Globoforce addresses this need with its latest release. Through its social DNA, intuitive reporting, and performance alignment, peer recognition can play a significant role in talent and performance management. The next couple of years will be fun to watch as social recognition fully enters the stage of must-have HR technologies.”

– Jason Averbook, CEO and co-founder, Knowledge Infusion

“Performance management is only as good as its data. With this release, Globoforce uses recognition as the central data component for performance and potential indicators. The result is a useful, compelling data set of organisational relationships and performance assessments that are created in the context of getting work done. By further leveraging this data into performance reviews, business and HR leaders will be able to align ratings with the performance and behaviours that everyone across the organisation recognises on a daily basis.”

– Yvette Cameron, vice president and principal analyst, Constellation Research

“Social recognition is offering a new vantage point on employee engagement and workforce performance. As companies strive to identify high-potential, high-performance individuals, recognition data offers one of the most compelling use cases I’ve seen in HR. This is a burgeoning new technology development that will reshape performance management over the next three to five years, giving HR leaders the insight about their talent they have long sought.”

– Jim Holincheck, managing vice president, Gartner Inc.

“Organisations are hungry for the data that will help them make better decisions about every aspect of their business, and employee performance management is mission critical. Globoforce’s Talent Maps not only provides multiple streams of actionable data to manage individual performance, it also provides the organisation with a cultural diagnostic that gives visibility into engagement, goal alignment, and the informal networks that drive organisational change and results.”

– Mollie Lombardi, research director, HCM, Aberdeen Group

About Globoforce

Founded in 1999, Globoforce is the world’s leading provider of employee recognition solutions. Through its social, mobile, and global technology, Globoforce helps HR and business leaders elevate employee engagement, increase employee retention, manage company culture, and discover actionable insight about their talent. Today, employees across the world are living their company values and achieving peak performance through the SaaS-based Globoforce platform. A private corporation, Globoforce is co-headquartered in Southborough, Massachusetts, and Dublin, Ireland.