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.