Amazon's data-driven approach becoming more common

The article depicted a work culture where staffers are under constant pressure to deliver strong results on a wide variety of detailed metrics the company monitors in real time — such as what gets abandoned in peoples shopping cards and what videos people stream — and encouraged to report praise or criticism about colleagues to management to add to more data about workers performance.

"Every company is somewhere in process toward using data to get a better handle on who their top performers are and to understand where people stand," said John Challenger, CEO of outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

Consulting firms Accenture and Deloitte both said this year they would revamp their performance review processes, for example, adopting a more data driven approach that includes more frequent ratings by managers and other internal feedback and data that can be aggregated and analyzed to provide a better portrait of performance than a single rating.

In an essay in the Harvard Business Review, Deloitte said the new approach uses "the technology to go from a small data version of our people to a big data version of them."

The company, with clients including music-streaming site Pandora and marketing automation company Marketo, sends employees what it calls "pulses," or short surveys about how they are feeling and how they feel about their job.

Glint CEO Jim Barnett said the surveys let executives see how the health of their employees and company are faring in real time, in the same speed with which they might be able to check sales results or marketing impressions.

Since the "pulses" to company employees recur more frequently than traditional reviews.