Astute readers (all two or three of you) of this blog will notice I’ve splashed on a new coat of paint and chrome on the old blog – it was about time as I’ve had the old theme since 2007.  I’ve also upgraded my dasBlog engine from 2.0.something to the latest revision, 2.3.9074.18820 which has me current to March 16/09.

This upgrade (which incorporates a point release) fixes some outstanding bugs with the engine and updates how certain macros behave, Javascript errors and time/date handling.  This said, I’ve noticed that the CSS layouts are a tad off under IE8 – running under compatibility mode this seems to be resolved, although I notice it does mess up images.  FireFox 3.5 renders the same as IE8, so it appears that the themes may need to be updated.

Over the next few days or so I’ll be working on tidying up the layout and adding back some elements from the previous theme like tagclouds and RSS feed links and Twitter/Facebook linkages.

With SharePoint 2010 on the horizon and increasing waves of “millenials” joing the workforce, we’re finding customers more and more concerned about how to approach governance around social networking media.  They know they need to get on top of this, but aren’t sure how to do it while maintaining control over corporate resources.

I recently came across a couple of resources that provide a really good starting point:

• Mashable.com – Social Media Policies from 80+ Organizations
• Database of Social Media Policies via Chris Boudreaux’s site for his upcoming book Social Media Governance

This is an area where even within MCS we are just starting to formulate guidance for enterprise customers, and it’s not because we’re necessarily behind the curve, but that it is a very subjective and complex issue:  It depends heavily on the culture of the organization and its political will to open up traditionally locked-down lines of communication.

Case-in-point:  I was engaged on a project for a large customer last year who was wanting to introduce social networking where an experienced partner was brought in to help develop and structure their efforts.  They recommended an approach that seems to run contrary to common sense, but is in fact the exact right thing to do:

1. Develop and publish a policy that advises employees the rules of engagement on social media, ie. it’s a communication medium like any other, you are responsible for what you post, think about what you’re writing, there are penalties for breaching existing codes of conduct online, etc.
2. Start out with all the social networking spigots turned “on”
3. Observe how employees interact with the system; mediate conflicts quickly.
4. Begin to turn off the spigots that aren’t being used or are causing problems.

Think of the “spigots” as features – blogs, wikis, discussion threads, MySites, corporate Facebook pages, Twitter, etc.

A really sensible approach when you think about it.

Other resources:

• TechNet: Governance Resource Center for SharePoint 2007
• MSFT: SharePoint Collaboration Service Governance Plan
• White Paper: SharePoint Internet Presence Governance Plan
• MSFT:  Sean Livingston’s SharePoint Customization Policy
• MSFT:  Original SharePoint Governance Plan

I recently came across a blog post on a site for a firm that was started by ex-Microsofties that caught my attention and resonated very deeply with me:  Employee Performance Reviews Do More Harm Than Good.  The author reasons that one of the most destructive practices used in corporate management today is the annual performance review because it is an inherently biased, subjective and ultimately disingenuous practice.

Having gone through quite a few performance reviews for many different employers, I can attest they can come off as exercises in spin where it seems there is an unwritten/unspoken understanding that someone has to be thrown under the bus so it might as well be you – a point in simpatico with the author’s observations on using reviews to determine rewards:

If you have 10 employees, where 2 people are super stars, 7 people are solid contributors, and 1 person is flailing, then you may be able to distribute the money equitably. But what if you have 5 stars and 5 solid contributors. Essentially, everyone is doing a good job. And shouldn’t they be? After all, you took the time to screen them carefully in the interview process. So now you can either peanut butter the money across them making no distinctions or you can grade everyone on a curve. If you do the curve, then your least solid contributor, who may be quite a good solid contributor (cause after all, you are great at hiring) is now treated like they’re flailing. And after all, we’re a capitalist society, and competition is good. Right? It makes everyone try harder. Right? But guess what, it’s hard to find good people. Treat that least good solid contributor like they’re flailing and they may leave. Or even worse, they’ll stay and turn into a flailing employee. If you take the other tack and peanut butter the rewards across your employees, then you’ve told the superstars that there’s no incentive for being a superstar and they may start flailing. And the only reason you’re in that pickle is because you told the superstars that they’d be rewarded individually in the performance review process.

This is the trap that performance reviews necessarily engender.  With disastrous consequences.  A colleague recently posited to me that getting a bad review isn’t necessarily connected to objective reality (ie. that you really did suck as an employee) – it really can be about distributing scarce resources and buffering margins for folks who get measured on how much money they are saving by not doling out bonuses.

Ka-thump, ka-thump-ka-thump.  That’s the sound of the bus wheels rolling over your hard-working corpse:

Essentially, the performance review process incentivizes managers to always have only a small handful of super stars and a steady stable of bottom of the rung performers who can take the shitty reviews. There’s no incentive for having a balanced team of good performers. As a manager it’ll just screw you at review time.

When viewed through the lens of employee-on-employee competition, this takes on an inevitable, cynical overtone:

How surprising that people don’t work as a team when their personal compensation (and more importantly, their sense of self-worth) is impacted so directly by a system of employee vs. employee competition. One where the expectations are set in advance. There is a top, there is a middle, and there is a bottom. And believe me, no matter what spin your manager puts on it, you’ll know exactly where you are when you get that performance review. Disappointment is almost impossible to avoid except for those consistently landing on top.

His solution?  Do away with performance reviews altogether and instead adopt a more active and engaged management style:

Instead, how about firing poor performers in a timely fashion rather than waiting for the forcing function of an annual performance review. That way the remaining folks can all go on with their lives of contributing and feeling good without the specter of individual performance review. Every day an employee still has their job means they’re doing it well. And if it’s important to reward people, how about we reward them as a team since that’s how we expect them to operate.

Personally, I’m a fan of contrarian thinking because I find the status quo is often the status quo because people refuse to challenge it – it’s the same stilted reasoning that gave us the Ptolemaic view of the solar system for hundreds of years, ultimately taking a Copernicus and a Gallileo to straighten things out.  In this sense, I find what the author is stating quite compelling.

A definite must-read for those who want to understand how to improve employee incentives.