By Matt Daniel Madsen
Good feedback makes employees more effective and more engaged at work. Yet agreeing on what makes feedback good and how to give employees enough of it can be a complicated problem. Research and testimonials showing the value of feedback don’t provide all the information you’ll need to make sure everyone in your organization receives effective feedback.
At last year’s Learning Leadership Conference, I presented 10 key aspects of effective feedback and advanced ways of ensuring your organization provides employees with consistent, reinforced, and actionable feedback. One of these key aspects with far reaching implications on how to actualize quality feedback is the principle of fit.
‘Fit’ Is Unique to Your Organization
You’ve likely heard the term before. When it comes to performance, fit means feedback matches the context, culture, setting, and work being performed. That means that no consultant, business case, or AI can swoop in and tell you how to roll out a system of feedback in your organization, because they likely don’t know your organization well enough. Those tools can be helpful, but the change needs to come from you.
Consider this example: A company benefits when employees share their resources rather than hoard them. It may feel natural for leadership to tell employees to be collaborative, find synergies, and assume noble intent when working with each other. Company training can say as much. Slogans and mentors can reiterate it. But none of that will matter if that’s not what your company rewards.
One promotion made possible through selfishness, one department closed because of ignorant altruism, or one performance cycle where bonuses are awarded for the wrong reasons will speak louder than a supervisor’s feedback. While Peter Drucker may not have said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, the culture you reward is the culture you deserve.
Feedback is complex. It includes what employees experience themselves and what they see happening to colleagues. It is so much more than the praise and constructive criticism received for a recent project.
Feedback Is More Than Words
In order to make sure quality feedback is given and received, take a look at your organization’s context, culture, setting, and work performed. You can start by considering any of those pieces. Think about what opportunities exist within your setting to provide feedback. Can part of your feedback system function when supervisors aren’t meeting with their teams?
Imagine you tell your employees that quality matters above all else. You say that they have the responsibility to ensure that your products meet the highest performance standards. They are experts. Their insights matter. Nice words, but do you make sure they fit the setting that you help create?
Toyota found a way to do so with the Andon Cable. A bright cord with the power to stop production running through every workstation on the factory floor. If an employee sees something that might be off about a piece or vehicle, they are expected to pull the cord. False stops are not punished; they are encouraged. Every stop is met with a collaborative team effort to find underlying problems and make improvements.
As Dr. Deming said, “Inspection does not improve quality, nor guarantee quality. Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product.” Like all manufacturers, Toyota uses quality inspection, but only as a failsafe and feedback tool to improve the production system and to educate employees.
The Andon Cable isn’t just a visual reminder of a commitment to quality. It’s a feedback tool for employees to share ideas with each other and management layers above them. If someone sees a way to improve the quality, speed, or safety of a process, they can pull the cord. And the same type of teaming and problem solving applied to failures is also applied to opportunities.
Use of the Andon Cable has evolved. Now with digital interfaces that usually don’t shut down the production line, the Andon System remains an integrated approach to implementing employee insights and concerns. The culture of empowerment and responsibility that the Andon Cable helped create has outlived the cable itself.
Yet the cable hasn’t disappeared everywhere. Manufacturers aspiring to Toyota’s level of quality have adopted similar cords and cables on their own manufacturing floors. Borrowing parts of another company’s culture can be risky.
Like any transplant, borrowed practices can be rejected by a new host. The success of these transplanted cables depends on their new host organization’s willingness to ensure fit. Seeing a peer reprimanded for stopping the line will teach workers to avoid the cord at all cost. The physical object has value only if it reminds employees of the actual context, culture, and setting of their work, as supported by policy and leadership behavior.
Feedback Requires Leadership Buy-In
Your employees can and should enjoy the benefits of frequent and effective feedback. Outside sources can help, but you have to drive the effort. As with any organizational change, improving feedback consistently across your organization will take buy-in from leadership, efforts of a senior champion, celebrations of small wins, and frequent communication bordering on over-communication.
As you follow the steps of proper organizational change, make sure to consider how well your feedback effort fits your organization. If the things you’d like supervisors to say don’t match your reality, take a close look at changing something else first. By considering fit, you’ll be able to give employees frequent and useful information and follow through with the promises you make. You’ll walk your talk, practice what you preach, and giveback what you feedback.
Image credit: Supatman
