New Features in Winter 15 for Work.com

Work.com is coming a long way and getting even more attention with each release. Winter ‘15 has several enhancements that both bring fun and ease of use to employee performance as well as make manager’s lives a bit easier. Here are a few features worth highlighting.

New Badge Tab

Here at Arkus we are utilizing badges for all sorts of reasons; thanks, praise, general acknowledgement, etc…. Currently you can create a new badge on the Recognition tab but it’s more like a visualforce page setup. In Winter ‘15 this changes to a new badge tab that works just like a standard Salesforce object so you can customize and add custom fields. It has a badge home page where you can create list views and create new badges. Another plus with this change is you can now search for badges in global search.

From Chatter you can not only select a badge to add to a post but you can now search for badges within the publisher.  You are no longer able to give badges from the Recognition tab, in fact, Salesforce.com is recommending you remove the Recognition tab since all the same information is included in a User’s profile recognition subtab.

Deployment of Performance Cycles

Previously if you had an inactive user in a performance summary cycle it would not deploy, the performance cycle manager would have to go through the list and remove inactive users before they could deploy which is kind of a nuisance. Now, with Winter ‘15, inactive users are automatically removed and the cycle is deployed. When deployment is done, the manager will get an email which includes all those users that were removed.  This is a nice time saver for performance managers.

Automatically Suggest Skills

The suggested skills feature can be enabled by administrators, this allows for automatic skills to be suggested for a user based on topics that appear in a users profile. I’m interested to see what the community thinks about this when it’s released.  How accurate will it be? What flexibility will users have to flag and un-flag these as skills for a specific user?

Enhanced Goals in Pilot

As this section title states, the Enhanced Goals feature is in a pilot program for Winter ‘15. The feature, like new badges tab, looks and acts more like a standard Salesforce object.  For administrators, customized layouts, fields, actions, etc… can be created. Metrics are tied to individual goals set.

Salesforce1

I would be remiss if I didn’t include Work.com enhancements with mobile. For badges there is a new badge selector where users can search for a specific badge based on name, description, and owner. You also have the ability to filter badges by:

• Most Recent Badges
• Company Badges
• Badges I Created
• All Badges

For all your achievement tracking needs, users can review, edit, and create both Goals and Metrics all on Salesforce1.

So there you have it for features coming up with Winter ‘15 for Work.com. I especially like how they are modifying features so they are closer to the behavior we are accustomed to with standard Salesforce objects.

Do you have a favorite enhancement you’re looking forward to with Work.com? Please feel free to comment below, on the Salesforce Success Community, on our Facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @LeiferAshley.