Fostering Feedback

hreonline.com
Fostering Feedback
By Maura C. Ciccarelli

Organizations need candid feedback, yet it’s often not supplied as frequently as needed to make solid business decisions. Two experts discuss ways companies can improve their employee-feedback programs.

Monday, February 1, 2016

Getting honest employee feedback is a tricky prospect. What strategies we think are effective — having an open-door policy, establishing real or virtual suggestion boxes, conducting online surveys, etc. — are actually wasted efforts if an organization’s culture doesn’t make it safe from the very top for employees to give voice to their complaints and ideas.

To understand the best ways to encourage and get employee feedback, HRE spoke with James R. Detert, a professor at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, and Ethan Burris, associate professor of management at the University of Texas in Austin. Together, they have studied what inhibits workers from giving feedback as well as what organizations are doing right — and wrong — in this two-way communication dance.

Why is it so important to understand why feedback works or doesn’t work in an organization?

JD: This world is simply too competitive and complex for anybody at the top to have all the answers and know what all the problems and opportunities are. Learning from people who have their ears to the ground and have more real expertise is crucial to performance. The second reason is simply that we live in a democracy. We say we believe in freedom of speech, ideas, and thoughts, but when you’re in most workplaces, you basically lose your First Amendment rights. When people feel repressed, it’s much harder for them to truly enjoy work, feel engaged and satisfied, and feel they are really contributing.

EB: The irony is that organizations really need this candid feedback, yet it’s not supplied as frequently as needed for organizations to make good decisions. It’s a very personal thing to be engaged and excited about the work that you do and feel that you are [making] a difference. When your direct boss or someone higher up in the hierarchy doesn’t pay attention, ignores you, [or] doesn’t use your feedback in a way that you think is most appropriate, it’s hugely damaging to your relationship with that organization. It’s a strategic question around how organizations can best take advantage of their employees’ ideas and it’s also a very personal experience.

How can HR leaders improve the process?

JD: If you don’t send signals from the top down that [feedback] is safe, that we will listen and that we will do something with it, [then] it’s really an uphill and mostly losing proposition. We’ve been approached by HR folks who say, “We can’t get the CEO or the senior team or C-suite interested or the senior business unit level people, but we want to work with [a lower level of the organization].” My single biggest pushback would be: “Then don’t bother.” [Laughs] You cannot change the culture around speaking up from the bottom up. You change it by the senior people fundamentally changing behavior, policy and practice.

HR can play a role in aligning how people are evaluated and promoted [if an organization says it] espouses honest communication. If people still believe that the way to advance in the organization is to be a yes-man or yes-woman, you simply won’t have a culture of honest input. People pay a lot of attention to who gets promoted and what they believe are the reasons for promotion.

If you ask people and organizations to describe [what happens when people speak up], the majority of the urban legends we’ve heard are negative. For example, so-and-so spoke up and was gone a month later. That’s natural because people tend to remember bad stories longer and with more potency. That suggests that HR can play a really active role in celebrating [honest feedback] in formal and informal ways. [Ideas include publicizing internally that] this person shared this idea and saved the company this much money; this person is receiving a reward [for his or her idea]; or [top leaders can] start certain kinds of meetings with a thank you or recognition to an employee for specifically pushing and challenging them and giving them an important suggestion.

What types of organizations are doing it right?

EB: It’s a lot easier in very small organizations than in very large ones because of things like access to the top people and being able to influence culture more immediately. [However], a really large tech company in Silicon Valley that I’ve been working with has not only hammered out policies but has also tried to institute things about its culture to explicitly encourage [people] to speak up a lot. Now that [its leaders] have thousands of ideas, the challenge is in asking how do they prioritize them, what system will help with that, and how do they then communicate with employees so they feel that their ideas are heard and considered.

What resources can help?

JD: The book Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmul, president of Pixar, has at least 15 concrete instances in which he shows tremendous insight about subtle barriers – changing furniture, redesigning entire office spaces and designing processes for periodic reviews of the films at various stages. As you can imagine, these are [projects] that people have massive identity invested in. He describes a really brilliant understanding of how ambient stimuli such as furniture and room layout [and] power dynamics can make a difference.

Google has similarly understood that, if you want people to interact more freely, design your organization to have lots of common areas. Design your cafeterias to have long tables so people have to sit together rather than isolate themselves. Google, like other organizations, has used technology not just to collect ideas, but also to have people build on other’s ideas, by allocating points, or fake or real dollars [for] better or worse ideas and volunteering to become owners in those processes.

EB: The other side of it is, if you are an employee who wants to pitch an idea, how do you tangibly set up those conversations, especially if some of them are a bit more difficult or challenging? Doug Stone and company from Harvard have a book called Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. That’s an excellent introduction to [setting] the stage so that you can be more productive and not get killed in the process.

Anything else HR folks should understand about the feedback process?

JD: More often than not, voice problems are just the unintentional reality of people’s orientation to authority. HR can help managers understand that the challenges of getting your people to be honest with you has nothing to do with being a good or bad person or leader. It’s just the reality of human hierarchy. People are [often] unintentionally shutting others down. It’s really about awareness-raising rather than finger-pointing.

EB: We have yet to meet a manager who says, “I have a closed-door policy. I’m just not interested in hearing my employees’ feedback.” For the most part, developing a policy is not going to fix the real issue. This is really about culture change. That takes a long time, a lot of effort and a lot of failure along the way.

JD: Ethan and I have both seen occasions in which HR has led task forces or reviews and probably the net result was only to increase employees’ perceptions that it is futile to speak up because they collect more data, waste more people’s time on surveys or interviews asking about speak-up problems, and then basically do nothing. It’s worth it for HR folks to really consider whether there’s truly a commitment to doing something systemic and over a sustained period of time, because if not, they might actually make the problem worse by engaging in a half-hearted effort.

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