Many organizations struggle to convey the rationale of organizational decisions as reliably as the operational details involved. A similar challenge concerns the feedback employees receive on the results of their efforts.
Employees often say that they are given very little information about the impact of the day-in, day-out work they complete. They may be told they have done exceptionally well. They almost certainly will hear when they have performed poorly.
But rarely are they told what impact their onging efforts are having on larger organizational objectives. Is their work helping reduce departmental expenditures? Is it raising levels of customer satisfaction? When it comes to overarching organizational goals like these, they simply don’t know.
This lack of feedback is frustrating on a personal level, but it also degrades performance at the organizational level. To understand why, imagine the game of bowling if a curtain dropped across the alley every time the ball was thrown, preventing you from seeing how many pins were knocked down.
Imagine how many times you would be interested in throwing that ball, if you received no information on the results of your efforts. How long would you stick with that task? How seriously would you take it? And if you were obliged by your supervisor or your organization to keep after it day after day, what would your attitude towards your work be?
Of course none of us would put up with that for long. Yet countless employees face situations no so different, filing records and producing reports with no clear idea of what purpose they are meant to serve or what impact they are intended to have.
It becomes clear why feedback is central to fostering employee engagement and promoting ownership, responsibility and initiate-taking.
By giving clear, concrete, and constructive feedback on the results of initiatives, then, you can ensure that employees don’t feel like their efforts are disappearing into a black hole. More importantly, you can help them take as much ownership in the success of initiatives as you do.