what are your employees doing?

At Business Ready we strongly believe in the importance of understanding the value of a company’s human resources. It’s important to stay connected to your employees and to understand your work environment from their perspective. While you’re busy trying to stay up to date with developments that affect your industry, competitive advantage and bottom line, your employees are likely trying to stay up to date with ways to improve their own value.

Assessing an employee’s performance or efficiency is difficult and without some basis for measurement, it’s almost impossible to defend a reasonable salary, bonus or increase. One attempt to help bridge the information gap between employer and employee is recently launched ididwork.com.

As reviewed by TechCrunch on August 6, ididwork is a web-based service to let employees keep record of work they have completed. According to Cameron Christoffers, “the founders plan on eventually charging employers after the service takes off, allowing early adopters to continue using it free of charge. To expand, the service plans on integrating desktop widgets and customizing performance breakdown charts in the distant future.”

From an employer’s perspective, it’s difficult at first glance to see any great value from ididwork. I can imagine alot of over analytical employees wasting alot of time attempting to categorize, diarize and justify the work they’re doing. This is geared towards the under-appreciated, probably frustrated employee looking for recognition, validation or direction. From the demo’s fictitious employee:

“Since I’ve done a good amount of work recently, I’d like to get a mini review from my manager just so I know what he thinks about my current performance.”

“I know exactly what my manager thinks about me and I didn’t have to wait until the end of the year.”

For companies with a strong and consistent focus on human resources and regular employee feedback, solutions like ididwork are much less relevant. But be aware that solutions like this are emerging and if you find evidence that your employees are interested in using technology solutions like ididwork to compliment your existing process, don’t ignore it. If it works, try introducing these solutions consistently within your organization.

Just be sure to avoid half-hearted attempts to use it as a replacement for relevant, face-to-face feedback.