SilkRoad Technology Inc. has launched Point, the latest tool in the social talent management solutions provider’s Life Suite product range. The new employee-centric social networking solution connects employees to each other and their organisation by uniting the popular features of social networking with talent management.

SilkRoad Point gives employees the forum they need to share expertise and be recognised by peers and leaders while simultaneously helping companies to better understand what and who is driving their business.

The launch follows positive feedback from industry experts and HR professionals in attendance at the HR Software Show, Olympia, where Point was previewed last week.

“Our research shows that organisations that adopt peer-to-peer learning, recognition, and knowledge sharing dramatically outperform their peers in customer service, time to market, and employee engagement,” says Josh Bersin, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bersin & Associates, the leading provider of research-based HR best practices that drive business results. “SilkRoad Point represents a new breed of consumer-like social talent tools that organisations can use to easily leverage the power of social connections in corporate learning, collaboration, and project management.”

Employers often have a limited view of what employees are actually doing as job descriptions and performance reviews don’t always accurately depict employees’ knowledge and contributions across the organisation.  With Point, organisations can increase knowledge and insight through the use of social collaboration and learning. Employees identify centres of influence by contributor, content and topic.   As a result, organisations create a self-motivating culture where employees can be identified and recognised for their influence and recognise others for their contributions.

“HR has struggled to understand how knowledge and information flows across the organisation,” says Lisa Rowan, Program Director for HR, Learning, and Talent Management Strategies, IDC. “With Point, organisations now have the ability to reveal not only the connections between its employees but the meaning behind them and how it impacts the company. Point enables companies to share goals, inspire innovation, and increase efficiency to drive organisational change and success.”

Features include:

• People and Connections – Increase collaboration and connections to share links, files, questions, photos, polls, announcements and feedback across the organisation.
• Groups – Connect people with similar interests by creating Groups.  Groups can be used to align a team around a particular topic or set of goals encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration.
• Content – Share content in the form of articles, thoughts, Q&A and files by posting on either a personal landing page or a group home page.  Comment, reply and discuss to build better solutions through collaboration.
• Points and Influence – Tag topics with a ‘Point’ to help categorise content for more efficient search strategies. By identifying Points, which can include thoughts, documents, files etc., influential content and its author(s) will emerge.
• Integrated Learning Platform – Allow users to easily access and manage their learning plans directly from Point.  Informal social learning supplements the knowledge gained by the learning programs found in GreenLight.

“With Point, we’ve closed the gap between social networking and talent management by converging them together to drive even higher levels of employee engagement and performance,” says Brian Platz, COO of SilkRoad. “Using Point, companies can more easily encourage and increase knowledge sharing for greater productivity, innovation and collaboration.  Organisations are enabled to better engage and retain employees using social networking features already familiar to employees while decreasing risks with greater insights into strategic workforce planning.”