Hey! How’m I doin’?
—Ed Koch
former Mayor of New York City
We all need former Mayor Koch’s question answered from time to time, especially about our workaday activities. We all like to know what bosses and peers think of our performance so we have some inkling if we’re on the right—or wrong—track. As a manager, your people look to you for the information they need to (1) recognize and keep doing what they do well, (2) understand and improve what they do less well, and (3) stop doing the things that contribute little to unit or organizational goals.
Information that genuinely answers those “How am I doing?” questions—that your people can use to either confirm (call attention to good work) or correct (call attention to work that needs improvement) their performance—is called feedback. It comes in many forms and from a variety of sources:
• Some feedback is easy to get and hardly requires any effort to understand—charts and graphs of group and individual performance are fixtures in many workplaces.
• Some feedback is tucked away in the heads of customers—or your head as a manager. No matter how inaccessible it may seem, if your people need it to keep their performance on track, you need to get it to them, preferably while it’s fresh and before it has been homogenized.
Somebody once said that if it wasn’t for all the statistics, baseball would have died years ago. True or not of baseball, it says something important about human nature. We love performance data—the more tangible, visible, and countable the better. How high did he jump? How far did it travel? How fast did she run? Questions like these hold endless fascination for us all.
In business, we track calls handled per hour or day, problems resolved on first contact, shipments per day, on-time deliveries against standard, and customers per register. Such feedback can be addictive. We love to know how we did all that today compared to yesterday, this month compared to last, in our department compared to a group in another building, or the people on another shift, or from another organization.
Through charts and graphs—the kind a normal human can decipher at a glance, not the multidimensional variety that requires a PhD in statistics to make sense of—data displays give employees valuable feedback on their performance and motivate them through the mechanisms of “confirm” and “correct.”
Tom Connellan is a leading authority on the use of feedback, recognition, and reward systems in maintaining high levels of quality service. In his book, Bringing Out the Best in Others!, he identifies the six principles that the best display feedback systems follow:
1. Feedback works best when given in relation to a specific service quality goal. Goal-directed behavior is very powerful behavior. Tell a new waiter or waitress that they waited on twenty customers tonight and the first question you’ll hear is invariably, “Is that good?” Good feedback tells employees not only how they are doing, but how they are doing relative to the goals and performance standards they are expected to meet.
2. Wherever possible, the feedback system should be managed by the people whose work created the service in the first place: frontline employees. How many times do we put a staff rather than line person in charge of gathering, sorting, synthesizing, and circulating information on everything from delivery time, widget quality, and scrap, to customer satisfaction and employee retention? The net result is that by the time such staff-managed information gets back to where it can actually affect the service delivery system and process, it’s almost always useless as either confirmation or correction.
Given the right tools and a little training, frontline employees should be quite capable of gathering information on their own performance, putting it in a PowerPoint chart or graph, matching it against predetermined norms, and deciding whether or not improvement is called for. And when they do it themselves, they are more likely to believe the data, will act on it faster, and will become more responsive to customers’ unique needs because now they know “how they add up.”
3. Feedback should be immediate and should be collected and reported as soon after the completion of the service rendered as possible. The sooner the feedback is received by the people it concerns most—the people it’s about—the easier it is for them to relate their specific job behaviors to the customer’s service quality or satisfaction assessment. If you were a driving instructor, you wouldn’t wait until tomorrow to tell Peggy she just turned the wrong way on a one-way street. You’d want her to know how she is doing in time to keep you both from becoming someone else’s statistics.
4. Feedback should go to the person or team performing the job, not to the vice president in charge of boxes on surveys. Obvious? Maybe. But check your current feedback practices. How long will it take for information gathered today to reach the people at the front line? Rule of thumb: the older the data, the less useful for changing the way things get done in your service delivery system.
Let’s suppose you just now decided to order four giant pepperoni pizzas as a lunch treat for the folks in your call center. How well received will your little gesture be if first the pizzas had to be signed for by a security guard two buildings away, then picked up by a mail clerk on regular office rounds, and then brought to your office for your signature before you could take them out to where you wanted them to go in the first place? How good will those pizzas taste by that time? And will you really want to be their bearer?
If Domino’s and Pizza Hut can deliver direct, your feedback system can, too. Immediate, direct feedback helps your people meet their goals and targets, in the process minimizing the amount of “looking over their shoulder” corrective supervising you have to do. Remember, autonomy and self-reliance are key components of an environment that nurtures empowered frontline workers.
5. After it has served its immediate purpose, relevant feedback should go to all levels of the organization. Everyone has a “need to know” when it comes to information about how the organization is performing. But just because it’s “feedback” doesn’t mean it’s feedback in the proper form or context. Senior management likely has no need for the level of detail that frontline employees and managers need to have to fine-tune the delivery system.
Asking “Who is this information relevant to?” instead of “Who would probably want to have a look at this?” is a good tool for eliminating needless paper shuffling. And the lower the proportion of useless information people see, the more attention they’ll pay to information of value.
6. Feedback should be graphically displayed. The adage that “one picture is worth a thousand words” is certainly relevant when it comes to feedback. With the design capabilities and user-friendliness of today’s software, it’s easier to create compelling charts and graphs that give employees both the big picture and snapshot-sharp specifics at the same time. It also provides a readily understandable comparative benchmark for the next batch of information.
Do your people really want to know? Believe it! We learned that lesson at the same theme park we mentioned earlier. According to the folks in the marketing department—who had been keeping all of the info to themselves—there were wild day-to-day variations in guest satisfaction. After much deliberation, it was decided that “something needed to be done.”
But what? After discussing good and bad feedback methods with us, John, the human resources manager, had a fifty-foot-long by ten-foot-high wall next to the time clock turned into a giant graph for displaying guest satisfaction scores as measured by a thirty-six-item survey. Instead of batch-processing data, new survey results were added every day.
The meaning of the moving line was not lost on employees. In fact, in short order they began to ask for more detailed survey results so they could see exactly where improvement was needed. After a few weeks, the “guest satisfaction index” began rising. And though it took occasional dips, the wild swings in customer satisfaction were never seen again.
When a feedback system doesn’t work, it’s often because the information gathered is being used incorrectly. It has stopped being feedback and has become a chore, a threat, or something to be avoided. Dr. Karen Brethower, an industrial psychologist, uses the following six questions for troubleshooting a sick feedback system.
1. Is the feedback being used to embarrass, punish, or scold employees? In one company, a “Rude Hog” award for the service rep with the lowest customer satisfaction ratings became a badge of honor. “Way to go Harry! Don’t let the SOBs push you around” was the spirit it inspired.
2. Is the feedback about something that has no payoff for the people receiving the information? If there is no personal or departmental relevance to the information being collected, stop collecting it. Or at least file it under “nonessential.”
3. Is the information being provided too late for employees to act on it? Too many things change too quickly for weeks-old or months-old information to have an effect on meaningful responses. You want to avoid giving people results from a customer satisfaction survey done six months ago.
4. Is the feedback about something the people receiving it cannot change or affect? You can tell a five-foot-tall person he’s short, but nothing positive will come of it. Similarly, customers might report being upset about what it cost them in gas to drive to your store, but there’s little your staff can do about it.
5. Is the feedback about the wrong things? Salespeople can’t help it if customers think the store is inconveniently located or isn’t decorated in a warm and friendly way. Get that feedback to someone who can act on it.
6. Is the information difficult to collect and record? Collecting and recording data can be a positive experience for your frontline people—unless the procedures are hellaciously difficult. We know of one company where employees rebelled against a quality improvement plan because they found the procedures so time-consuming that they were working overtime just to do their “real” jobs.
Good feedback is like a compass needle. It won’t get you where you’re going, but it will keep you pointed in the right direction.
Good management consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.
—John D. Rockefeller