Work.com Overview

Here at Arkus we recently went through the Work.com partner academy and have officially become a certifed Work.com partner.  After 8 hours of training by Salesforce’s own Trity Dow, we received a wealth of knowledge on what it is and what it can do.  Here are some key points worth considering if you are looking to making Work.com your performance management solution.

What It Is

Work.com is a performance management solution that is fully integrated on the Salesforce platform helping improve performance through recognition, coaching, and feedback.  It has three tiers of product that are known as Motivate, Align, and Perform.  Each tier offers different levels of functionality at a different price point.   Motivate is the base product and listed at $10 a month per user and offers primarily the ability to give recognition and rewards.  Align is the mid tier package for $15 a month per user and offers all that Motivate offers but adds the ability to create goals and provide coaching. The Perform tier gives you all that Work.com has to offer for $20 a month per user. The added functionality offered in Perform is the ability to provide performance reviews.

Recognition

Recognition and rewards comes with all the product tiers and promotes a culture based on collaboration where recognition and feedback are provided in real time.  Gamification is introduced through the use of badge recognition with the goal to increase the engagement of your employees.  There are a select amount of predefined badges but users are empowered to create and give out custom badges that will appear on your Chatter Profile.  An added feature to badges is that you can attach Amazon.com Real Rewards.  The process to do that is pretty simple and easy.  It is said that Work.com on average increases recognition of achievement by 45%.

Goals and Coaching

Goals and coaching are introduced in the Align product line.  Employees can easily create business or personal goals and managers can create 1:1 coaching relationships that align directly to the employees goals.  A key feature is that goal duration is customizable which is great in that new employees may require shorter goal durations like 30 or 60 days and more seasoned employees may require 3 or 6 months.  Built into the coaching and goal features are the concepts of mentoring and feedback.  Feedback in particular is interesting in that it can be given by anyone and can solicited or unsolicited.  All of these features enable a repeatable metrics-based coaching program. No goal is worth creating if it cannot be measured.  Customers have reported a 38% increase in coaching, 35% decrease in new employee on-boarding and a 45% increase in goal setting with Work.com.

Performance Reviews

Performance reviews are only available in the Perform product and it is centered on the ability to take all this information around recognition, coaching and goals and analyze it.  Creating a review includes the ability to create question sets to be sent out to a group of people on a defined cycle to gather feedback on an employee. In addition, there is a really cool feature that allows you to look back over the course of the review time and grab recognition or feedback and add it to the answers in the review. Once you have gathered the content you want in the performance review, you can make it actionable.  For instance, if an employee needs to improve their knowledge on a product, you can easily set that as a goal that will show up on the user profile.  Customers have reported a 34% increase in skill development and a 39% decrease in time to complete performance reviews with Work.com.

Work.com Out

Now that Work.com has been rebuilt on the Salesforce platform it can truely be said to be fully integrated which makes it a perfect time to get on board.  It takes the power of the social network and brings it to the world of performance management.  If you are struggling with employee performance and are intrigued by the way Salesforce allows you to do it, then Work.com might be right for you. We at Arkus have made the decision to use Work.com internally and looking forward to the results.

If you would like to discuss further tweet at me at www.twitter.com/Salvatoriello or comment below.