Why continuous feedback is critical to your organization’s success
)
How often are you asking for feedback? How often are you giving it? Find out why you might need to up the frequency in this article about the importance of continuous feedback.sen
Everybody comes to work to do a good job and give their best. It is how you enable them and work with them as individuals that will influence if they leave, meander along or excel to new heights.
We know that regular check-ins are business-critical. It keeps communication lines open, helps build trust and keeps everyone moving in the same direction. People are more productive, satisfied, and fulfilled when they trust that their leaders and organization are concerned about them as a whole person, not just an employee. And this relies on effective, regular employee feedback.
The importance of continuous, effective feedback lies not just in the feedback given, but the nature of the interactions. It’s not a session for critical evaluation, but check in – how you are doing, what is going well, where do you need help.
These basic inputs are the foundation for a meaningful conversation of value, that helps both leaders and their team members build trusting relationships.
Asking the right questions, the right way and at the right time sends an important message that the organization and their leader is indeed genuinely concerned about them as a whole person. You can also use neuroscience to further enhance the effectiveness of your feedback.
How neuroscience helps create value during the check-in process
We are a tech company that believes that technology should not replace human connection. Our technology is designed to help create human connections and guide meaningful conversations of value to both the team member and their leader.
intelliHR leverages a simple neuroscience technique to help create value through our check-in process. In essence, if two people come together already prepared for their conversation, it will be a more open conversation and there will be no fight or flight response. This helps the conversation get to a deeper level.
Having an open conversation about how someone is doing also helps leaders and team members keep in check and stay objective in their understanding of how things are really going.
Regular feedback eliminates leadership by assumption, removes opportunities for avoiding issues and creates opportunities to keep expectations closely aligned.
Enhancing leadership capabilities is a key focus for every organization. Imagine having the ability to improve leadership capability rapidly.
The importance of continuous feedback is that it helps people leaders take more responsibility for their own employees’ experience. intelliHR serves up the answers to the most important questions at the right time straight to the people leaders’ inboxes. intelliHR recognizes that most people leaders are too distracted to check in with team members unprompted and separately a lot don’t have the confidence to have constructive conversations, so intelliHR helps them with this and also does it on a regular monthly beat, so that the importance of continuous feedback isn’t undermined.
FREE DOWNLOAD: 1:1 Manager employee check-in template
How to overcome recency bias
Recency bias at review time is a common complaint of many traditional review processes. intelliHR removes recency bias by helping leaders check in on a monthly basis and then visualizes that information over a timeline for any formal review processes down the track.
Traditional performance review processes rely on managers and leaders correctly recalling an employee’s performance over a long period of time.
This is problematic as humans are prone to recency bias; we put more emphasis on recent events as they are easier to recall. And hence employees are often judged by their recent contributions, with work from months ago neglected or forgotten. intelliHR removes this bias by presenting a summary of all contributions for each review period. So past achievements aren’t overlooked, they’re highlighted.
Learn more about how to avoid recency bias in feedback.
How to increase user adoption
User adoption of feedback tools only comes with confidence by the team member that the organization cares about how they are feeling and most importantly acts upon it promptly. Avoid survey fatigue by asking questions that mean something to team members and helps to surface answers to the important questions.
Within intelliHR, the questions are deliberately designed to be something that the leader and organization is both able to and willing to do something about. We know that if leaders act on feedback, catch up and discuss it, it will create both trust and value in the exercise that will positively reinforce an organizational culture based on trust.
Top-down or bottom-up feedback?
Top-down surveys that are anonymous really struggle to give any instant or real value to team members. They are also disconnected from the team member/ leader relationship as they bypass the leader and can also result in delays before any action may even be taken, reducing meaning and value of the exercise.
Any action taken may also be organization-wide and not necessarily addressing individual needs and feedback. Today’s business is agile, it is transparent and it is empowering. Our continuous feedback is transparent and bottom-up which fosters a strong working relationship with team members and people leaders. If leveraged the right way, it can foster a high-performance culture where the people leader plays a genuine coaching role.
The importance of continuous feedback data
Leveraging feedback firstly requires the data to be meaningful data, and secondly, people leaders, HR teams and Executives need the means to analyze it.
People leaders receive the feedback in intelliHR as it is completed, helping to keep them informed in the moment. HR Teams and Executives can maintain full visibility of the organization in real-time with our AI natural language processing tools, predictive sentiment analysis and keyword analysis creating an efficient high-level way of visualizing feedback from large workforces. Our in-application exploratory analytics and insight generation feature helps finding valuable insights from both qualitative and quantitative data collected.
intelliHR’s continuous feedback process helps organizations go beyond feedback by helping them keep an eye on all of their team members’ happiness, compared to normal.
Just by using the intelliHR happiness rating in regular check-ins, the system automatically plots a happiness baseline individually for each team member, so that any new check-in is compared to how the team member normally feels.
This is quite powerful, for example, Team member A might always rate “happy” as a 9 out 10. Team Member B, might always rate “happy” as a 7 out of 10. intelliHR helps you know what is normal for each team member, so if Team Member A falls to a 7 out of 10, whilst on the surface of the rating is ok, in reality, it is a big drop from their normal and knowledge of that would help their leader explore it in their catch up and also help them prioritize a meeting sooner rather than later.
If Team Member B continues along at a 7, then that is normal for them resulting in a totally different conversation. intelliHR champions developing tools and processes to help create meaningful conversations for all participants.
Linking ROI and HR as a recognized driver of financial performance
People are more productive, satisfied and fulfilled when they trust that their leaders and organization are concerned about them as a whole person, not just an employee. It is well researched that employee experience equals customer experience which equals competitive advantage and financial performance.
intelliHR makes it easy for HR teams to keep an eye on employee happiness and the related themes trending in feedback in a measured and transparent way. This helps HR demonstrate the value they have in and around the organization in increasing employee experience through various programs, continuous improvement initiatives, guidance and support.
HR teams use intelliHR to explore, segment, analyze and prescribe trends so that a macroscopic approach can be executed with microscopic precision.
Want to read more about the importance of continuous feedback and how to use it in your organization? Check out these posts: