« Blame Canada if your communication isn't working | Main | Is letting people participate really so scary? »
July 16, 2009
How do you rate?
There's an interesting article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic on the growth of ratings, those consumer-driven 5-star-to-none systems that rate books on Amazon, hotels on travel sites and contractors on Angie's List.
According to writer Kevin Maney, "rating is about to spread like a pandemic. Everything—everyone—will get rated by Web users. You. Me. The dentist. All the hairstylists in town. The sermons in every place of worship. Youth soccer coaches. Lunch meats."
Ratings will not only proliferate, they will change societal dynamics, predicts Maney. "Look at (ratings') impact on the relationship between doctors and patients. According to Pew, 47 percent of Internet users now search online for information about doctors. Ratings, though still a trickle, are increasingly part of that information." But soon there will come a day when we choose a doctor not on the recommendation of a friend, but on how patients rate his or her bedside manner or quality of care.
Why does this matter? Ratings are another form of social media, and reinforce the growing expectation among people (and employees are people, too) that communication is not something we view, but a process we participate on.
If you gave employees the power to rate aspects of the workplace, what score would they give? For instance, how would they rate your company's intranet? Leader town hall meetings? Health benefits? Pay?
This idea might seem preposterous, but it's also intriguing to think of an environment so transparent, so participative, that employee ratings are a way of life. Now, that would be engaging.
Posted by Alison Davis at July 16, 2009 09:06 AM
(Find me around the web)
Comments
I don't find the idea preposterous at all. It sounds like the traditional employee satisfaction survey on steroids. Instead of doing it annually or every other year, you'd have a real-time window onto what's on employees' minds. What a great tool that would be.
You'd need to be mindful of potential unintended consquences - "managing to score," not balancing the input with other equally valuable information, etc. And you'd want to develop a scoring system that was both simple to use and nuanced enough to give you useful data.
Still, what a fascinating initiative that would be.
Posted by: Dan Hutson at July 23, 2009 06:12 PM