How Feedback Culture Is Transforming Engagement - My CIPD15 Observations

Observations from the 2015 CIPD Annual Exhibition and Conference

It was a privilege to take two days out the office last week to listen to what some of the most successful, influential and enlightened HR and L&D leaders had to say about the changing nature of work and the future of HR. Whether it was the frenetic live tweeting (guilty as charged), the supersonic turnaround of the ‘Blog Squad’, or the snatched conversations between seminars in the exhibition hall, I felt a real energy this year - the likes of which I hadn’t felt at previous conferences.

However, at the risk of believing our own ‘inflexion point’ hype, I’m ever conscious of swaggering away from such gatherings punching the air like I emerged from watching ‘Rocky’ the first time, only to witness the same script in next year’s sequel. So it’s fair to say it’s taken me about a week to absorb and digest it all before beginning to paint a picture of how I believe feedback culture is fundamentally impacting the way we engage with employees and driving relationships at work.

I was originally going to cover the conference in a single blog, but there was too much going on to squeeze into one article. Instead, I’ll share my thoughts in four posts, looking at the key themes of being people centric, using analytics and technology, attracting talent, and cultural transformation. In this piece, I’ll focus on the need to put people first.

We’re living in a people centric workplace

The value we place on our human resources has shifted, as organisations realise that employees are the real stakeholders.

“ We used to say HR has to be more business-savvy, in fact, business should be more people-savvy.”

“We used to say HR has to be more business-savvy, in fact, business should be more people-savvy,” was how CIPD CEO Peter Cheese put it, when he kicked off the event. By putting people in the centre of the universe we need to focus less on best practice models and more on adapting the talent journey for what is right for the individual and the context of the organisation. Traditional approaches to performance management are simply not achieving their purpose, Cheese went on to argue, and team leaders need to be connecting with their people all the time. This means that they need to be listening and responding to their concerns, nurturing their development and providing them with the right opportunities. Technology plays a central role in allowing HR to enable managers to have better conversations at more regular intervals, rather than simply once a year at appraisal time. Software can also provide the opportunity to collect feedback on an ongoing basis, in real-time, meaning that concerns get raised quickly – and can then be dealt with rapidly.

Wellbeing

A second facet of being people centric is to genuinely care about the wellbeing of staff, both for the sake of their own health, and the impact on the wider business. It was high time that wellbeing in the workplace was given the priority that it so rightly deserves, and who better to wave the flag than Professor Cary Cooper? In his session he outlined the current situation - mental health issues cost the UK some ￡70bn per annum and only 2 in 5 employees are working at peak performance. This equates to an estimated cost to employers of that can be attributed to mental health related absence. And there is also the growing phenomena of presenteeism - those who attend work while actually sick, and leavism where people take holiday just to catch up on the work they couldn’t do during normal working hours.

Only 2 in 5 employees are working at peak performance

With wellbeing starting to appear on the corporate agenda we heard again how HR needs to adopt a more agile, human way of working since the traditional playbook of rules and performance management systems have simply failed to deliver results. Wellbeing surveys were recommended as a primary way of dealing with stressors as we start to realign our KPIs to include GNW (Gross National Wellbeing) to complement GDP. There is a clear correlation between job satisfaction and both mental and physical health, so ensuring high levels of wellbeing benefits both employees and employers.

Celebrating excellence

Part of building a people-centric culture is to encourage a continuous dialogue between managers and staff. Feedback expectations have changed – in today’s era of social media, employees, especially millennials, want to know how they are performing much more regularly. However, most people are still not told when they have done a good job. Many managers are guilty of giving people feedback when they have done something wrong, but rarely do they offer praise or appreciation with such speed and enthusiasm. This was highlighted as a fundamental flaw in the way organisations communicate feedback and we need to ensure managers are equipped with the softer skills that are becoming increasingly relevant. But before you can change what’s going wrong in an organisation you need to find out what’s actually happening, by listening to staff.

What gets recognised gets repeated

We heard from Inji Diducu that what gets recognised gets repeated, linking to the importance of finding things to openly celebrate. Contribution and recognition are the two primary factors that make people happy and feel human at work. Increasingly we’re beginning to see decentralised bottom-up feedback environments that allow for continual peer to peer recognition to increase motivation and engagement. The benefits that 360 degree feedback, crowdsourcing for ideation and real time sentiment analysis can contribute to employee confidence were celebrated in a number of sessions. From Sir Clive Woodward and Matthew Syed we learned how sports stars are successful, not just because of innate talent, but due to the fact that they receive constant feedback, yet we fail to apply these lessons in the workplace. With 80% of millennials expecting regular feedback from their boss, Adrian Bettridge from the RAF contended that continuous improvement can only be driven by soliciting feedback on an ongoing basis.

Putting people at the heart of the company can look like a daunting challenge, particularly for larger organisations with tens of thousands of employees. It will require cultural transformation and adopting a new mindset in many cases, but listening to staff and putting their interests first will help to retain, motivate and develop them, consequently driving improved business performance that benefits everyone.

In my next post on the conference I’ll look at the emerging discipline of HR analytics, and focus on how technology can help ensure data-driven decision making. I look forward to connecting with you on these topics.