Modern Business Magazine April 2016 | Page 48

MODERN WORKPLACE When Poor feedback affects profit By Georgia Murch W hen we don’t give people the feedback they need it makes sense that they are unlikely to improve, unlikely to change and unlikely to repair or mend relationships or problems – because they don’t know about them. When we finally muster the courage to give it but do it poorly the consequences can be just as dire, if not worse. Feedback should not be stored up for performance reviews. It needs to be wired into the everyday of how we communicate and make decisions. After all, the quality of your communication dictates the quality of your decisions and relationships. So why are so many organisations still stuck past? The concept of ‘performance management’ was introduced about sixty years ago as a means to determine the wages of an employee based on their performance. It was used to drive behaviours to generate specific outcomes. When employees were solely driven by financial rewards this tended to work well. In the late 1980s not all employees felt rewarded, nor motivated 48 ModernBusiness April 2016 by financial gain alone; many were driven by learning and the development of their skills. From here performance management started moving into more frequent monitoring and reviews with a focus on ‘regular feedback’ outside the formal review process. As organisations put more regular conversations into the mix there was a notable Organisations that are in touch with the now; the high-performing organisations exist where all employees, not just the leaders, are being taught how to give great feedback and also how to receive feedback with equal candor and grace. Organisations that do this are in their ‘feedback flow’. But there are far too less that are gaining this as their competitive edge improvement in productivity and employee engagement, when the conversations were handled well. This still meant that the onus was on the person giving the feedback rather than the person receiving. Deloitte’s research and costing tells us that an annual appraisal for 65,000 staff took 2 million hours. Expedia says it mostly wanted to ‘rehumanise’ the relationship between employees and bosses.