Ask any Tech company what their most valuable asset is and
19 out of 20 will shout, “Our People!” Unfortunately, they don’t always act as
if this is true. Companies have become
better and better at tightening the consumer feedback loop through NPS, agile
practices, and digital analytics tools.
Smart companies will take some of the same techniques and apply them to
their most valuable assets, their people.
Here I’d like to explore a few guidelines and then give two examples of
how a tight Human Resources feedback loop can be implemented.
There are a few basic guidelines that should be considered
in creating a good HR feedback loop. What
it boils down to is ‘good karma’. The
loop should be encouraging, forward looking, and energizing to the team. Generally, transparency is the best way to
go: openly talking about successes, failures, and issues. However, if you are
building a feedback loop for the first time, in response to a large problem, or
if there is significant distrust in the organization, anonymity may be the best
route. This is because you may have
serious problems embedded in your organization and vetting them openly will
cause ‘group stink’, the emotional equivalent of ‘group think’ where the
problems feed the teams’ negativity and discontent. The team members need to be able to share
their honest feelings and know that they won’t lose their position because of
problems they see so in high problem situations, anonymous surveys or
interviews (use a third party of some sort) will be best to start out with.
A star example of transparency is Scrum’s Daily
Standup. The idea is to bring a team
together daily for fifteen minutes and do a quick report on what they have
accomplished, what they plan to accomplish, and roadblocks or impediments. This gives task-related transparency to
issues on a daily basis, making a very tight feedback loop. This method can be adapted for more employee
or work related issues as well as adapted to different levels of the
organization.
A good example of an anonymous feedback is using an NPS
system for working at the organization. Ask
your employees ‘on a scale of 1 – 10, how likely would you be to recommend a
friend to work here?’ give extra
questions for the employee to tell you about specific problems you may need to
fix as well as space to write down his own thoughts. This will help you capture hidden points,
good and bad.
In summary, your employees are your greatest asset so make
sure you treat them like it! Apply some
of the same techniques you use for your customers. A transparent approach is best for a
continuous, long-term HR feedback loop but an anonymous approach is much better
for certain situations. Good luck!
