Mediaboss Marketing

Wouldnt it be great if you could prove youre more valuable to your company than everyone else?

Thats the idea behind a new social networking tool from Saba, an outfit that makes human resources software. On Tuesday, the company will unveil yet another Tweetbook-type application for businesses, called the Saba People Cloud, competing with business social networks such as Yammer and Jive. But theres a twist: Everybody gets a People Quotient (pQ).

Yes, the pQ is a number that seeks to rate how valuable you are. Its reminiscent of services such as Reppify and BranchOut that analyze your activity on public social networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to create a score for HR departments thinking about hiring you. Instead, Sabas grabs similar info from its own company-specific social network and build a score specific to your activity in the workplace.

In some fields, employees are already rated with hard metrics. Salespeople are easily ranked by the number of deals or dollars they bring in. But in other cases, your impact to the company is difficult to pin down. Saba CEO Bobby Yazdani tells Wired that he wants to cultivate an environment where a company knows exactly how well all employees are performing. We want an organization where people can benchmark themselves and know the impact of what they do, he says.

At this point, sharing a pQ score across the network is optional. But to many, it may feel like another example of social networking turning into Big Brother. While Yazdani says Saba is just starting this journey with pQ, rating ones performance according to their activity on a social network will undoubtably provoke debate. After all, theres more to work than sharing, commenting and the other nuances of social networking.

The algorithm behind pQ will examine a wide range of data. Simple tasks like completing your Saba profile and entering background certifications contribute to the score. But as you use the service regularly updating your status, following other employees, and being followed your activity will play into the score as well.

The engine looks across an organization to compare your performance against other managers with similar positions and goals, and it determines the quality of your social interactions and contributions across the company. The idea of quality is part Google search algorithm, part gamification, and part natural language processing. Its like a corporate Klout score a controversial score that rates your social networking impact on the public internet.

The more you accrue followers, engage with others, and post stuff that people reference in their own posts, the better your pQ score. If you share a report you wrote and a bunch of people cite it, your pQ increases. Saba also runs through the feedback and comments on what you share, and it decides whether it was of value to the company.

Not all businesses have the same goals and operations. But Saba says that as employees share and interact on Sabas network, the algorithms learn how people operate and react accordingly. The system also alerts employees when their scores are low.

Read more:
Meet Saba, the Social Network That Rates Your Job Skills