This really grabbed my attention, because it touched upon a technological reality of today’s work force, to include even our workforce. This is an idea that seeks to work with the mindset of today’s younger generation, and certainly enhances a learning organization capabilities. Did you hear that? Yes, learning organizations is the theme for any company and it’s culture or even today’s military and it’s culture if they want to be successful. And constant feedback is essential for the health of that learning organization. It is not good enough to do a yearly review, or a monthly review. Today’s youth, and I would argue even our older work force (once familiar) would want more feedback about how they are doing, if there was a technology available to them to make that an easy process. Emails and forums are ok, but they are not specifically designed for feedback generation, so what next?
Enter Rypple. This is still in the Beta, and only a handful of companies are using this, but it is some radical stuff. It is a evolving program, that is free to sign up with, that has created a tool for the free flow of feedback, back and forth between bosses, mentors, and employees. I challenge today’s security contracting community to take a hard look at this kind of thing, and see if this is something they could use. Your older workers might be intimidated by this, but your younger workers might really appreciate this tool.
Imagine, you feel really bad about your performance at the range or on a mission, and you want to get some feedback about how you did or what you could have done differently from some of your cherished mentors or instructors or team leaders. But scheduling time or circumstance just couldn’t allow that to happen. Using a system like Rypple, where you ask the question of your network, and they answer back(or at least a few of them) so that you can get that feedback could be the answer. I guess you could use an email or forum, or you could use something that is actually designed to facilitate this feedback network. And for bosses and employees that hate doing evaluations every year or every month, something like this would be cheap and easy to do as a form of evaluations. Every company should be using evaluations, so that everyone knows where they stand in the company and how they are doing. Rypple would be a very easy program to initiate.