Claire McCarty expressed in her TED Talk that people are often wary of constructive feedback, nobody wants to be told that they’re wrong. But reinforcement in feedback can be ideal; even if it just to validate, and tell your colleagues that you see their efforts.
Of course, constructive feedback can provide quick turnaround and reinforce positive behaviours in itself. Some workplaces score employee performance on the floor, for the employee to look back upon and reflect upon, it provided the staff with the ability to quickly adjust their performance and actively improve, and hastened turnaround in workplaces, individuals actively able to look back on how their work has escalated in quality throughout their duration in a role.
McCarty encourages you to experiment with feedback. Giving public feedback during a daily stand up, or bringing in a physical reward like pizzas or donuts can be plentiful, and make your employees smile, especially if they begin to make the relationship between these rewards, and team successes, but also, rewarding people on the sidelines, after hours, informally, socially can be very rewarding too.
A friend of mine, Annie* told me that at a job she had, her role was predominantly related to appeasing children and encouraging them to have fun during the day, she used to have to give the children UV stamps so staff could identify if they had bought a ticket to be on the premises, and strove to make sure everyone was engaged in the fantasy. She’d give blank wristbands to stuffed toys so they could be included, and the customers really liked her. But, when you hear the same spiel over and over again, like her supervisors did, they began to comment on the repetitive and boring nature of it, and she noticed the behaviour that gave her numerical scores in the high eighties and nineties from her supervisors when she began doing this, were slowly dropping into the seventies. And yet, when supervisors that covered breaks came in, they gave her high nineties. The numbers made her appear inconsistent. It didn’t make sense to her. But, when she ran into one of the supervisors’ covers’ she was told he absolutely adored her energy and wished she was in his department. That suddenly meant more than any number she’d seen in months. She had been seen by someone in a well-respected candidate as someone he wanted to scout next season.
Did he necessarily know that even after such a long time, Annie would remember?
McCarty encouraged private acknowledgement, and positive feedback, and how these pieces of private feedback you have to acknowledge how “powerful”.
Based in London, U.K., and founded in 2016 by Arvind Mishra The Agile Works (www.TheAgileWorks.com), is an up-and-coming recruitment and Agile consulting company. Arvind is a Certified SAFe SPC and regularly delivers both private and public SAFe certification workshops.
He is a design thinking expert, Sr. enterprise, portfolio Agile Coach with over a decade of experience working as an Agile coach in diverse industries such as banking, pharma, retail, auto, oil, gas, consulting and government.
The Agile Works; a small team of three strive to help shape the leadership's mind-set and values in readiness for their business transformation journey challenges. With Arvind at the helm, we strive to provide you with the agility tools to make your company that can thrive, and not just survive.
To book a consultation, or for any enquiries, you can contact Arvind via the following email address: arvind@theagileworks.com
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