A Commitment to Feedback
In my continuing series about human resource issues, I’ve decided its time to tackle the issue of Feedback.
If any issue in managing people has lip-service paid to it, it is feedback. In my lightly seasoned opinion feedback should be:
- Frequent
- Consistent
- Actionable
- Honest
- Bidirectional
Lets tear these apart.
Frequent
All too often feedback is reserved for the employee performance review. While this is an important and necessary time to provide feedback, at many companies this is a yearly process. From an employer’s perspective yearly means that you’ve potentially paid an employee for over 2,000 hours of work that had if they received quicker feedback they could’ve been more productive. From an employee’s perspective a year is a significant time to let bad habits sink in, that just increases the effort needed to correct them.
I propose that a formal feedback system be utilized at 1 week of employment, 3 weeks of employment, 6 weeks of employment, 3 months (12 weeks) of employment, 6 months of employment, and every 3 months thereafter. Mind you I’m not proposing some elaborate twenty page form to fill out, but something that a supervisor could finish in five or ten minutes for an employee. This could be passed to the employee, and then discussed after both supervisor and employee have had time to think about it.
Now any formal feedback system should never preclude or be detrimental to informal unscheduled feedback. Often, this is as if not more important than scheduled formal feedback.
Consistent
Consistency of feedback has two components.
Firstly, feedback must be internally consistent in content between all the different times feedback is given. (e.g. Don’t say you should turn left more often one time, then say you should turn right more often the next time. If when giving feedback you need to correct an overcorrection, note that the person you’ve given feedback has overcorrected and needs to readjust.)
Secondly, the time periods over which feedback is given should be consistent. If you noted in my suggested scale above I suggest an essentially logarithmic scale to providing feedback, maxing out at once every three months. Mind you this is no more frequent than shareholders expect to receive reports on the company. Quarterly is a good time to do this.
Actionable
The feedback that you give should either reinforce actions that are already being taken, or correct actions that need to be changed.
The best example I have of this is from my theatre experience. The worst feedback someone could give me after a show was “It was good.” Feedback like this drove me absolutely batty! Why did it drive me batty? Because I couldn’t take action from it. When someone told me a play was good, it didn’t tell me what I did good, nor what I could’ve done better.
Feedback should suggest what behavior is expected in the future, and give example actions to make that behavior happen.
Honest
I can’t do much to tear this one apart. But simply be genuine in all feedback you give. Sugarcoating feedback can be more detrimental than not giving feedback at all. The most effective feedback I have received is that which struck me hard between the eyes. I’ve found the feedback that I most needed was delivered raw and unsugarcoated. If it is worth saying, it is worth saying directly.
Bidirectional
There are two components to the bidirectional nature of feedback. The first component is who initiates feedback. Feedback should both be pushed to the appropriate person when necessary and it should be solicited when it is needed from someone else. This means that you have both the responsibility to ask for feedback when you need it, and to give feedback when you think it is needed.
The second component to the bidirectional nature of feedback is that it should go both up and down the chain of reporting. (The usual “chain of command” metaphor that is used is an outdated and inappropriate military concept that should apply less and less to non-military organizations.) Supervisors have a responsibility to give feedback to their subordinates, and subordinates have a responsibility to give feedback to their supervisors.
Of course it is definitely difficult for subordinates to give feedback to their supervisors, but the best way to address this is for supervisors to constantly solicit feedback and to leave the door open for feedback. This dually important as if a supervisor is open to receiving feedback, more often their subordinates will be more willing to receive feedback.
Feedback is the lifeblood of driving performance in an organization. One need look no further than Pavlov’s experiments to discover the base psychology that is at work when giving feedback.