Creating a culture where Employees are given real-time feedback and recognition might just be the most underestimated strategy in business. And according to the Wall Street Journal, ‘awards, recognition and praise might just be the single most cost effective way to maintain a happy productive workforce.' It’s no secret that ‘Performance Management’ doesn’t achieve what its meant to, but how can you tap into the power of real-time feedback and recognition to improve and enhance managing performance in your business?
Outlined below are six approaches to incorporating real-time feedback and recognition into your day-to-day business activities, each of which has the potential to generate significant and lasting benefits to your business.
1. Make It Best Practice To Give 'In The Moment,' Effective Feedback
An organisation-wide live feed of feedback and recognition in relation to behaviour is an ideal way to both reach, and observe your employees, in a transparent and egalitarian manner. Train your Employees to positively reinforce the activities you want to encourage, and intelligently discourage the behaviours you want to remove from your workplace, and do so for all to see and emulate. Then, take the information and patterns you ascertain from your recognition data and use it to identify which Employees need coaching, more training, mentoring, or to find your top talent and cultural champions. Studies indicate that positive reinforcement is an essential element in managing behavior and correcting poor choices. In fact, according to research, the best performing teams tend to offer more than five positive comments to every criticism because they either intuitively (or have been trained to) understand the benefits. Invest in teaching your Employees to notice, acknowledge and reinforce great behavior.
2. Transform The Outdated Performance Review With Peer-to-Peer Insight From The Collective
Your Employees, as a group, have better intelligence about the performance of their peers than any one Manager will ever have. They see what Managers do not. When Employees are empowered to recognise which behaviors to praise, and those to discourage, these observations can play a significant and positive role in managing performance in a manner that is much more relevant, much more accurate, much more timely and much more fair. Find a way to tap into your organisation’s collective recognition data when you are evaluating performance for each individual and do it on an ongoing basis, not just once or twice a year. Using technology to gather this type of data is critical. Organisations that use peer-to-peer recognition see positive increases to key business metrics like engagement. Creating a flat, egalitarian structure to your feedback and recognition process empowers everyone in your business to manage performance.
3. Obtain Balanced, Accurate Insight Into Overall Performance
Harness the power of real-time data to give Managers, Leadership and HR a greater level of depth and a broader range of information about individual Employee performance over select periods, or across the whole year. Real-time data enables you to aggregate and understand behaviour and performance patterns over the course of months or years, and then use this data to inform the review process.
4. Enhance Relationships
A little thank you goes a long, long way. Whether Manager to Employee, Manager to Team, Employee to Manager or Peer-to-Peer, organisations that give Employees the opportunity to publicly thank and be thanked, strengthen the emotional ties within the group.
5. Create A Culture Based On Feedback and Recognition
The single most effective way to reduce turnover and keep your top performers is to create a culture that is too good to leave. Focus on creating a culture of feedback, recognition and appreciation that seamlessly integrates into your business processes, communicates strategy, goals and actions as well as linking to learning and development opportunities.
6. Align Feedback, Recognition and Managing Performance With Business Goals
Core values, overall strategy and individual business goals are the fingerprint of your organisation, therefore they should also form the foundation for how you approach giving feedback, recognition and managing performance within the business. By using real-time, values-based, crowd-sourced data for managing performance, you are putting your values at the heart of employee behaviuor.
7. Provide Your Team With Tools That Make It Quick And Easy To Give Feedback
Providing your Employees with the right tools to offer feedback, recognition and appreciation is an essential part of your culture building process. Technology that integrates seamlessly into your workplace IT ecosystem and makes all of the above possible is essential to your success. Finding software that enables feedback and recogition, as well as enabling you to incorporate values, goals, strategy, action plans, learning and development needs into the equation will become a key differentiator in the future of human workplace cultures. This type of technology creates an egalitarian approach to creating such cultures that involves the entire organisation and makes it possible for each individual to contribute and collaborate in creating a positive and enjoyable environment.
Of course, it's no mean feat to cultivate the type of organisation that incorporates all of the above in a seamless manner, from mission statement to action plans, from Leadership to entry level Employee. However, the technology exists today to manage exactly that at the click of your mouse. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks to discover how you can implement this type of real-time feedback and recognition to encourage great performance and build a more human workplace culture in your organisation.
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