Collaboration is an indicator of passion & trust and is a natural and efficient approach to problem solving. This in particularly is true in knowledge intensive settings where it can often be noticed people rely heavily on their network of relationships to find information and solve problem. It is also common to note in an informal network the employee behavior is comparatively more reflective than observed in an aristocratic or bureaucratic setup. It can also be commonly observed that collaborative interactions are the key to develop and accelerate the spread of new ideas or opinions for either creating a climate of innovation or for learning to help meet specific tasks.
With the markets becoming global and the workforce scattered across different time zones, it demands a process that almost resembles having a conversation rather than capturing records after the fact, thus creating a growing need for a strong communication tool to keep goals in focus & on track. The managers should be aware of how his team is tracking against all its goals and at the same time keep these interactions on a secured network as these are about business.
The proliferation of social and mobile technologies in the last 15 years has revolutionized how we share and communicate today and has fueled our ability to stay social 24X7. It is this technology which has made our lives easier and brought us closer to our family and friends. Having born directly into a new era of technology, millennials are hardwired and glued to their smart phones and other devices and the most defining characteristic of them is the fluency and comfort with which they use this technology. Now that millennials have surpassed Gen X in terms of availability of workforce it makes it imperative to provide real time work-space for teams to share data and socialize to get conversations started.
Online social collaboration has become part of workplace culture acting as a key tool for engaging employees by creating a feeling of inclusivity to the organization and for building a trust environment. Like Facebook/LinkedIn, the performance management system should enable its users to ask questions, post comments, make announcements, recognize peers and act as an incident diary of the employee to initiate constructive discussions by managers and the get the feedback.