WorkSimple – Get More From Your Work

Researchers have shown that people are more productive when they work as a team and feel supported by their peers. WorkSimple is an innovative workplace management application that aims to capitalize on that by offering tools that make it easy for colleagues to communicate, manage tasks, and provide support in an online environment. What makes WorkSimple different from competing management applications is its emphasis on rewarding accomplishments and praising employees in a highly visible environment.

Once your team has signed up for WorkSimple, you’ll want to get started by creating your first goal. Social Goals are tasks that can realistically be accomplished within the next 30 to 60 days, and creating a goal can be done in just a few simple steps. Type in a description of whatever it is that you’d like to accomplish, a date when you’d like to accomplish it by, and add some tags to help coworkers find goals related to specific departments or areas of interest. When your goal is active, you’ll want to share it with coworkers using the “Share Goal” button. The colleagues you’ve selected will be notified about your latest plans, and they can then show support by giving you helpful feedback and becoming “Goal Supporters.” Let coworkers track your progress by updating the status of your goals and adding quick notes whenever you take steps forward, and mark your goal as “Accomplished” as soon as all of your tasks are complete. Before signing off, you’ll want to review your work and thank all the people who supported you through the process.

When groups of people use WorkSimple, they can create robust team pages that show everything their members have worked on and accomplished since they began using the site. Over time, these team pages will become more useful as individual departments within larger companies compete to see who can accomplish the most goals and HR managers gauge which employees are the most and least expendable given their productivity levels over the past years.

Practical Uses:

• Help a coworker who’s struggling to finish a major project
• Set mini-milestones in finishing the thesis you’ve been working on
• Managers can compare employees and see which team members are most valuable
• Compare the success of your department to another department at your company

Insider Tips:

• Goal Support Scores measure how many of a user’s goals are supported
• Individual goals can be tagged for easy sorting
• Managers can comment on their employees’ goals
• Goal history pages chart the progress of competing teams

What we liked:

• WorkSimple gives people badges and rewards for accomplishing goals
• People can track the work they’ve accomplished since starting a new position
• Users can post their accomplishments on LinkedIn through their WorkSimple accounts
• Various departments can use team pages to work together on group projects

What we didn’t like:

• Larger businesses may have trouble getting their employees to sign on and use the system on a regular basis

Alternatives:

• Rypple – http://rypple.com
• SuccessFactors – http://www.successfactors.com
• Taleo – http://www.taleo.com

Company Info:

• Launched: 2010
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Morgan Norman and Ben Moore
• Web site: http://getworksimple.com

Costs:

• Individual plan is free
• Team plan is $5 per coworker, per month
• Company plan is $9 per coworker, per month