John Wookey has seen the future — and it’s social

Oracle… SAP… Salesforce.com. John Wookey has spent his career leading major product initiatives at the largest enterprise software companies on the planet. Last fall, Wookey joined Salesforce.com because he believed his industry was about to undergo the most radical transformation in its history — the transformation to social.

As EVP of Social Applications at Salesforce, Wookey is leading the company’s charge into HCM — a name and a category Wookey feels is sorely in need of reform.

“I’ve seen the continual change that our industry has created — or eventually accepted,” writes Wookey in the influential blog TLNT.com. “Social is the latest such change. And I believe it will have the greatest impact on business systems since our industry started.”

Here are some highlights of Wookey’s article:

HCM needs a social model

“Social Enterprise” engenders a feeling of happy people coming together to achieve a common goal.  There is great collaboration and meaningful transparency, which leads to both trust and alignment. By contrast, “Human Capital Management” sounds like a process for turning people into livestock for the company slaughterhouse.

But if there is any area that desperately needs a social model, it is HCM. People-centric systems should promote connection, communication, and collaboration. That is the core of the social enterprise.

Consider performance management, which is one of the most important processes for every company. Performance management systems are universally hated. Why? Because they create work for every employee in the company, while serving only to meet HR-driven compliance processes. Somewhere along the way in building these systems, we focused the core design on the wrong problem. And it’s as true for the most recent cloud-based systems as it is for traditional on-premise applications.

Social Performance Management

So what should performance management systems do? It’s hard to believe we need to even ask this question. But given the history of how these systems were developed and designed, the reality is that we need to fundamentally rethink their purpose.

Feedback should be open to everyone — and collaborative. It should support formal goal-driven feedback or simple ad hoc input on a person or topic. The result? Transparency, trust, and alignment.

To read Wookey’s full article on how social is transforming the way companies align and engage their people,click here.