Measuring An Employee's Worth? Consider Influence

>Salesforce.com won't disclose exactly how the Influencer algorithm works.

So the article proposes to use an obscure, undisclosed karma value for key personnel decisions. If this catches on, the next management bestseller may well be "Leadership secrets of the ancients: how to base important decisions on birds' flight [1] and animal entrails [2]".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex

An incentive to game this "system" is created the moment employees become aware it influences their performance reviews. Like all your friends' posts and thumb-down your competing co-workers' stuff. Sounds like a fantastic waste of time!

Ideally incentives are aligned with employee cooperation. The goal of this influence-measuring system is ranking employee worth which in general is dissonant and fosters an environment of unhealthy competition.

The big question is how to foster productive competition?

The trouble is, surely the most influential (especially in a small company) will influence people more through face-to-face contact than through corporate social networks?

Sounds a lot like Klout, and we all know how useful that is.

I have seen this product in operation, and I can definitively say that the way to increase your influence score is to post lolcat pictures.

chat·ter (chtr) v. chat·tered, chat·ter·ing, chat·ters v.intr. 1. To talk rapidly, incessantly, and on trivial subjects; jabber. 2. To utter a rapid series of short, inarticulate, speechlike sounds: birds chattering in the trees.

v.tr. To utter in a rapid, usually thoughtless way: chattered a long reply. n. 1. Idle, trivial talk. 2. Communication, such as e-mail and cell phone calls, between people who are involved in terrorism or espionage, as monitored by a government agency.

(Source: The Free Dictionary - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chatter)

You gotta to hand it Salesforce for inventing news ways for employees to waste time in their tools and still qualifying it as work.