Salesforce HR tool combines social networking and employee reviews

Remember when your Facebook feed was dotted with achievements that your friends won by playing Farmville? Well, you’ll see something similar now with Salesforce’s new Rypple HR tool.

Rypple uses badges and achievements to praise employees for the work they’re doing. It comes preloaded with cutesy badges, and managers can custom create any badge or achievement they like, such as “Sales staff just closed a huge deal, let’s buy private jets!”

Salesforce acquired Rypple in December 2011 and announced its version of the service today at Salesforce’s Cloudforce Social Enterprise Tour event in San Francisco.

In the acquisition announcement, VentureBeat reported that Salesforce would re-brand Rypple Successforce. Guess that name didn’t stick, because Salesforce’s branded version of the app is called, not-so-creatively, Salesforce Rypple.

“Performance reviews are the least enjoyable tasks done and they always have to be done once per year. We want to ensure there is a continual dialogue between employees and managers,” Salesforce software development executive John Wookey said in an interview with VentureBeat, “Rypple defines key results and actions, monitors the status of objectives and fosters a dialogue of the goals being set in the organizations, so people understand what’s expected.”

Employees and managers can access the service from its own website, which features a social media-like stream of achievements and goals. Anyone can set goals and objectives, then invite people to participate, and track their progress. Once someone does something awesome, you give them a badge. Employees can also “Thank” fellow employees for helping each other out.

Thanks to Salesforce’s acquisition of the company, Rypple is now accessible from the Salesforce dashboard. When you see that someone has closed a deal in Salesforce, you can give them a Rypple badge without leaving the site. Badges will also show up in your company’s Chatter feed, so everyone can see what you did and give you praise.

Salesforce Rypple will go up against Taleo and SuccessFactors, two human capital management companies that help companies measure their employees’ performance and offer feedback.

Let’s get social image via Flickr user Steve Rhodes