Feedback policy is an important ingredient that helps in performance management of any organization. Read more!

Feedback policy: The Road Map

Part 1 would have convinced you the need for change. Part 2 would have given you a completely new perspective of looking at people and their relationship with organizations. Now let us look at the Road Map.

It is clear that the need is to make a paradigm shift and a cultural change. But organizations are not that easy to change. We need to transform from a “engineered – money making – machine state” to a “caring – living – organism” that produces joy and happiness for its people, people who are its employees, vendors, customers and shareholders.

3.1 The process should demonstrate the intention

Allow people to provide and share 360 degree feedback and de-link this feedback cycle from the salary administration process. You are seeding a culture of open and lateral feedback.

Set aside a significant amount of your compensation budget to be used for converting reward points to monetary benefits and perks. Allow those reward points to be issued and received socially between people who collaborate on a day to day basis (without any approvals from formal channels). You are telling people that the wisdom of the crowd is more valuable than the individual judgments of managers.

Encourage managers to share appreciation as well as developmental feedback on a continuous basis and set aside time for on the job coaching and development of their team members. Emphasize the need for career development plans and growth plans in addition to performance reviews. Project and celebrate such managers as better leaders so that the culture spreads across the organization

Give a compensation budget and an increment budget to managers and let them decide how to use it. Set up separate system / process / template for arriving at quantum of increment for each team member within a team. Delink and separate this process / cycle from the Performance feedback cycles and Developmental Feedback cycles. (atleast by a few months).

3.2 Using Technology tools as a catalyst for cultural change

Now it is easy to provide access to technology tools to everyone in the organization, so that many of the initiatives recommended in the previous section could be easily executed and managed without too much manual effort.

Customizing the tool to suit your specific business and organization is very important. Elements of “where you want to get to” in terms of culture, can be incorporated in these tools, so that it percolates in to the organization over a period of time.

But ensure that you choose a technology platform or tool that has been designed and architectured to support this new paradigm of people engagement. Tools designed to automate traditional processes can do more damage than good, as they might re-enforce aspects of culture that you actually want to change. (Example: allowing a peer to give reward point and then asking the manager to approve it).

Conclusion

There is a need to re-look at the purpose of why business organizations exist and their role in growing and developing people. Then we need to re-define the relationship between people and their organization, so that people are not treated as “resources” to be managed like money and materials, but as people who have to be inspired and engaged.

Closed and Top down approaches have to be replaced with more open, lateral and social approaches. The organization has to become less like an engineered machine and more like a lively living system.

In this environment of cultural change and evolution, technology tools designed afresh (such as Synergita) can play a catalyst role.