Employee Performance: On-line Tool Provides Real Time Feedback Supplanting the Outmoded Annual Review

Annual employee performance reviews are both dreaded and derided. Both sides generally feel they are uncomfortable believe they fail to really provide both the feedback and outlet for finding common problem-solving ground they could ideally provide. As employee commitment and productivity continue to receive greater consideration as contributions to organizational effectiveness, this process gains in importance. It is a positive that work is being funded to improve the tools and approaches available.

Jennifer van Grove in Mashable provides an overview of a new, on-line instant feedback model:

"How do organizations and managers keep their employees happy? Certainly not through the age-old practice of annual performance reviews. A startup called Rypple aims to change that, releasing version 3.0 of its progressive online feedback tool to help employees get recognized for their work on an ongoing basis.

Rypple takes a real-time approach to employee recognition with a feedback platform that encourages regular and public recognition associated with tasks, manager-employee coaching and employee requests for feedback. The startup is rolling out a bevy of new features, gaming elements and a new look on Monday.

Rypple users can reward each other for jobs well done with badges that get posted to a Facebook-like wall; managers are notified in the process. Users can now create their own personalized badges to recognize achievement. Rypple is also now organized around people instead of concepts, a UI change that puts an emphasis on work relationships.

Another improvement is the addition of social goals. The tool enables users to create goals across multiple teams and link them back to action items. Progress made towards completing these goals will appear to all team members in the activity feed. This makes tasks more social and is designed to engineer even more participation.

Many of the updates were made in response to feature and design requests from customers, an appropriate move for a feedback platform.

Rypple is a freemium product; its creators believe it to be more a platform than an also-ran Twitter or Facebook for the enterprise. To that end, the startup plugs in to third-party APIs and serves as a layer on top of existing social products. Its current client base numbers in the thousands, and customers include Mozilla, Cisco and WebEx. In September, the startup raised $7 million in a Series A round led by Bridgescale Partners.