Work.com, Summer 14, and What is in It For You
Universally Available Skills
With Skills generally available in Summer 14, any organization with a Work.com license will have access to turn on the Skills feature. Users then can promote and share their areas of proficiency as well as endorse their colleagues'. This takes enterprise collaboration into knowledge awareness and adds a highly valuable layer to Chatter's context-based conversations.
More Mobile
With Skills, Goals, and Coaching right inside Salesforce1, managers will be able to do more with their tablet and mobile phones. This is of course huge for busier and on-the-go managers, making their mentoring activities more portable & present. Imagine while drinking coffee and waiting for a flight at the airport, endorsing a colleague for their Skills or changing the weights of the goal metrics for a direct report. Which brings us to the upcoming changes to Goals.
Goal Enhancements
Goal tracking is more adjustable and granular in Summer 14. In the release, you will be able to record reduction metrics and adjust weighting of the various Goal metrics. These changes really allow an organization to bring what matters to leadership into Goals. An employee underperformed? Record a reduction metric. All your most valuable key performance indicators (KPIs) will of course be more valuable. Adjust the value of weight for a Goal metric accordingly with a higher percentage. Also, any special initiatives can get more emphasis as needed. Perhaps there's also a carrot at the end in the form of a custom Reward with a Reward Badge that you create.
More Funds & Custom Rewards
Once the Summer 14 release is live, reward funds available will be increased. You will have more variety than just Amazon.com vouchers. Many more popular brands are going to be available through third-party vendor relationships like TangoCard so you can create your special reward. There will even be funds to support nonprofits available to purchase as well. Then you can take the next step & create a custom reward badge.
Just like you could create badges in your Salesforce with Work.com, now you can create custom badges for your various rewards. Whether it's a Starbucks card reward or one with SpaFinder, your creativity can come to life with clever touches to a custom badge. I can see some really fun things possible here... (This blog post is worth a Spa day right?)
Workflow Support
Any time a feature within Salesforce rolls out, it's only a matter of time before administrators want to automate. With Summer 14, there's so many Work.com features that will be supported by workflow and triggers making this possible. Let's think about auto-assigning a badge after a user completes their goal. Or applying several pre-assigned goals at the push of a button for on-boarding several new hires.
In Summer '14, most of the coming features are only available to Performance Edition customers, Work.com Motivate, Work.com Align, or Work.com Performance licensed companies. Don't know even the basics? See this Work.com overview post. If you don't yet have Work.com but think it may be right for your organization, we encourage you to reach out to your Salesforce.com Account Executive.
As you can see, there's a lot of really exciting stuff happening with this product. Overall, with Summer 14's improvements, Work.com is more deeply woven into Chatter and will likely continue along the same lines. At Dreamforce, I fully expect even more great features that will bring additional layers to this product. Hopefully, you can get started implementing Work.com soon if you haven't yet at your organization. And of course, as Arkus adopts Work.com and all the features here, we'll continue to talk more about the value it's bringing us.
Don't hesitate to get in touch if you have additional points or questions on Summer 14 enhancements to Work.com...find me on Twitter at @SeriouslyKyla, find Arkus on Facebook or the Success Community, or comment below!
