Week 1 – Defining Feedback
Lesson 3 The power of catching people doing things right
Any kind of feedback can engage employees. Gallup’s global research has found on average only 31.5% of employees are actively engaged in their roles (working with passion and a profound connection to their company) and 52% are not-engaged (essentially employees are “checked out” and going through the motions).
If employees receive no feedback, less than 3% of employees are engaged
If employees receive critical feedback, the percentage of engaged employees increases to 31%
If employees receive Strengths-Based feedback, engagement jumps to 2/3rds of employees
The Hawthorne Effect is an example of this in action. This came from The Hawthorne studies which were a series of experiments conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Chicago. Initially, the researchers were investigating the effects of lighting on worker productivity. However, they found that regardless of whether the lighting was increased or decreased, productivity improved. This unexpected result led them to realise that factors such as attention from management and the sense of being involved in an experiment were impacting productivity more than the actual changes in lighting.
The Feedback conversation impacts several areas of engagement including expectations, recognition, knowing someone cares about you, development, opinions count and more. See the diagram on Page 8 of your Black Workbook.
One critical role for a manager is to reinforce the culture, communicating these expectations, demonstrating these behaviours, and feedback when people do it right. What we want to do is create a series of experiences the will reinforce beliefs (things that are true). This will lead to actions which give us a result. See The Culture Pyramid diagram on Page 9 of your Black Workbook.
An organisations values (if available) set a benchmark for the behaviours we hope our teams will demonstrate. That is, what we want people to do, and what we want people to say. And when they do, should be celebrated.
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