It has been an important issued
globally for how we should evaluate employee performance objectively. Some
role could be accessed clearly such as sales by their sale amount. However,
there are many supportive roles that are very important in every organization
too.
For
example, IT department staff which have to help every departments solve any happening
problem and/or even recommend some tips in using the system. Normally there
will be only few specific IT staff that everyone will reach out if when they have IT
problem while other IT staffs are quite free as people will ask for help from only reliable and supportive IT staff. If the IT staff find some tips
that can help people in accounting department work much better or if they help all
customer service people to work with the system faster, are you sure these
helps can rise their evaluation. Mostly not, their evaluation depends on individual
judgment of few people, sometimes only one boss. What if some staffs are close
with the boss how to evaluate these people objectively?
Within an organization, it is not
difficult to build a subsystem that attach with the ERP or email or any system
that everyone in the organization have to use every day. All
transactions will be about the IT issue. Everyone can request help and any tips
will appear in this system.
The SNA could help analyze and
quantify information about how well these supporting staff work. It could tell
how many transactions (email/request/chat on the system) of these supporting
staff send with other people in the organization. For example, creating the centrality
report about how many transactions of each staff’s account (direct and indirect
support work) or how many issue people ask each staff for help or how many
transactions each staff use on average to complete one issue. These information
could be included in their performance evaluation which make it more correct and objective.
2 comments:
Good subject. What's missing is a demonstration of your knowledge of SNA and its applications. Hard to tell from this very high-level and non-specific description. For a really good write-up on a similar subject, see Vinay Tanwar's post.
Please let me explain more details about my thought.
From my experience, all Big4 global audit firms use the complex tailored Audit software that need closely IT support. If a team member has technical problem and stops work for 3 hours, clearly it costs a lot of money, especially higher position.
This project will answer these questions:
Within IT support dept., who do work really hard in solving problem for audit staff? Who are the first IT staffs that popular to audit staff due to their reliability? And who are hiding and do not work? Outside the IT department, who are helpful to others colleagues in terms of IT assist and should be awarded?
Data we need:
At PwC, all laptop we received has the particular application that we can request IT help anytime we have trouble in work. The application has correspondent mail, chatting, blog posting and other features that all communication can be traced in the log files. Generally, an issue could have many correspondences between IT staff and audit staff. But not only from IT staff, some audit staff can share tips in the blog or interact via private message to help each other. Actually, this application also have the feedback feature that we can give satisfaction rating to the related IT support staff every time we finish the issue. Unfortunately, it was not optimized in their performance evaluation as I was planned to.
How:
The pilot SNA version will analyze the issues happening via this IT support application. The centrality measure will show us following information.
>> In-degree number:
The maximum number identifies the IT/audit staff that helps others in IT issue and we can rank for all IT staff by these numbers. The numbers are result from, not only technical knowledge, but also friendliness that make people feel comfortable to ask for help which is important for this roles.
>> Out-degree number:
The minimum number shows some audit staff that consume less company’s resource to perform their work smoothly. These people are either cleaver or better in problem solving.
>> Eigenvector:
The maximum number show how well the IT staffs connect to the influential audit staff, such as supportive team leader or instructor of in-house training. It was more likely that their advice will be spread out from those team leaders/instructors. So, within limited time, these IT staff the can solve problems more by connecting to these team leaders/instructors.
Result:
All above helps should be included in the IT staff performance evaluation. Also, the highest rank of both IT and audit staff should be rewarded and recognized in the company’s announcement.
In reality, there is probably some IT staff that has very few interactions within this application. This kind of person should have a talk with their supervisor or management to improve their performance or other issue they would have.
To be aware of:
After we get number from the system, its implication should be agreed and discussed within managers for its reality. We could surprisingly found that some quiet IT staff work very hard in supporting audit staff. Some staff has very well technical knowledge but big trouble in communication. On the other hand, some IT staff’s interactions were mostly chatting, not working, which should not be awarded. We can trace back in the log files for any exception node.
Going beyond:
After pilot version, we can leverage the feedback of each issue solving. The feedback include rating of each work to each IT staff, identifying most favorite IT staff and identify how big each issue is. In addition, the company can include other communication ways that employees use in their work in the organization into the SNA.
I strongly believe that this project will be able to improve employee evaluation system and also eliminate overall time that audit staff’s struggling with IT. Beyond these, from the best helpful audit staff award, this could motivate audit staff in learning IT skills. All smoother work will result in more capacity in long term.
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