Outcome feedback process –
self assessment
Three key areas to think about
The processes people use to get feedback on outputs and outcomes can get into difficulties for lots of reasons. Three of the most significant are:
- Feedback is sometimes seen as an optional extra
- People’s insights may disappear without trace
- The mechanisms may not adequately support people to make their feedback as valuable as could be
If your feedback processes are to be DFVP, you need to have addressed each successfully. Scroll down to assess how fit your feedback processes are…
1. A disintegrated approach
A. The common blind-spot
Many people think they’ve communicated when they’ve simply told people stuff.
But that’s just ‘broadcasting’.
Communicating is a two-way process.
So even today the mechanisms, or the time people set aside for communicating often aren’t sufficient to do the job properly.
B. The consequences
If your organisation doesn’t fully support both sides of communicating, managers and leaders can quickly get out of touch with how well (or not) their broadcasts are being received. The organisation may miss opportunities, employees may feel disenfranchised; performance and loyalty may suffer, brand value go down and operating costs go up.
C. The self-assessment
Does your organisation’s culture recognise the two-way nature of communicating, and support ‘communicators’ to engage in it effectively?
2. A void
A. The common blind-spot
Even when the mechanisms are in place for people to provide feedback, it may disappear without trace.
There is often little governance:
-
- How are folk able to find out what’s happened to their contributions?
- Who’s looking at it?
- When can they reasonably expect an answer?
- If it’s a complex issue, what’s being done to come up with an answer?
- How often can or should people expect updates?
Many organisations have no concrete answers to many of these questions (or sometimes to any of them).
B. The consequences
In many ways it’s worse to enable feedback which seemingly gets ignored than to not ask for it at all. Few things could be more likely to upset employees than offering up insights for improvement only to feel their opinions are effectively worthless. What else are they going to think?
Again it hurts motivation, loyalty, and productivity, which inevitably risks damaging brand value and increasing operating costs. Not to mention missing out on the potential improvements the feedback might have wrought.
And once that good will has been lost, it’s all the harder to win it back.
C. The self-assessment
Does your organisation have mechanisms in place for ensuring feedback gets to the right people? And are there SLAs in place to ensure those people respond effectively to that feedback in good time?
If not, and you’d like to help employees make more productive contributions and feel better connected to the organisation’s success, you can…
…Find the solution here
3. Insufficient guidance
A. The common blind-spot
One of the reasons leaders aren’t always overly enthusiastic about supporting feedback initiatives is that a lot of feedback can be a bit of a waste of space – more of a whinge-fest than anything productive.
But should anyone be surprised by that? Most people aren’t IC Specialists. So is it any wonder their feedback may sometimes be unfocused, rambling, and leave its recipients unclear about either what the problem is, or what that person actually wants to happen?
B. The consequences
Ill-conceived and badly structured feedback can waste the time not only of the provider, but its recipient. It may take longer to identify issues that might require urgent attention. Or some great ideas may be lost altogether.
And if it’s discarded because it appears to have no value, it can again foster bad feeling among those who provided it – with all those attendant quality, reputation and operating cost downsides
C. The self-assessment
Does your organisation provide easy-to-follow templates which can enable employees to provide feedback which is relevant, accurate, clear, logically organised and complete?
If not, and you’d like to help employees make their feedback super-valuable every time, you can…