Feedback or Feedbag

Every dial, meter, button and auditory signal in an aeroplane flight deck is there to give feedback to the crew about salient aspects of the aircraft. And the more complex the equipment the more the dials; the more back-ups to every measure; and the more carefully they are maintained. Feedback is a matter of life and death.

Most organisations value the measures that provide senior managers with the information they need to run the company. Indeed it has been argued that one indicator of a good company is the range of sensitivity of its measures.

One reason why HR is so undervalued at many organisations is that specialists in that area seem either incapable of, or unwilling to, measure classic HR variables like absenteeism, morale or stress levels. Imagine the directors' meeting; the financial director arrives with a mountain of closely analysed profit and loss figures; the production director with measures of machine downtime; output per section etc.; the marketing director has sexy power point slides with pie charts and bar charts. But, often, the poor HR director has only pious platitudes and current psychobabble to offer.

Some HR people claim that what is important can’t be measured while what is measurable is not important. They are profoundly wrong. Certainly measurement of some things has a number of inherent problems but, with skill and multiple techniques, it can be done.

As jobs become more technological they may be easy to measure. Absence can be measured cheaply and accurately by heat measures on a chair. Key depressions on a computer may be one measure of communication, or productivity or idleness. Surveys on morale can be very easily and quickly done by email, making the business of data analysis simple.

It is all very well to measure people-variables but what they need is feedback on those measures. Let people know the cost of leaving their PC on overnight has lead to 30% rise in the electricity bill and they turn them off. Tell them the most common reason for white collar sacking these days is the downloading of pornography from the Internet and people resist that.

To live in a feedback free world is to encourage ignorance, idleness and deception. Annual, or more frequent, appraisals are meant to provide an opportunity for bosses to give feedback to their reports. But for various reasons this seldom happens. It is extremely rare to find business people who are satisfied with their appraisal system. It is even harder to find those who can claim to have even an hour a year with their boss discussing and getting clear, specific, evidence based feedback on their performance.

But the advent of 360-degree feedback has made people very aware of the power and importance of feedback. (In fact 360 degree is usually a misnomer. It is usually more likely just 180 degrees). The full appraisal usually involves the specified employees, their bosses, a few colleagues and ideally (but rarely) all their reports filling out assessment sheets. It often involves 30-60 ratings of the individuals concerned, in everything from communication style to attitudes to innovation.

The output of the 360 process is usually a fairly lengthy report. It provides numeric summaries of the ratings of the various people involved and can provide a "gap analysis" between self-ratings and those of select others.

The report comes in strong contrast to the vague comments about "satisfactory performance" in the traditional appraisal. It is easy to see strong and weak points; to notice the differences between various different people’s ratings and to ponder on the cause of the differences between self and other ratings. For many the first 360 is a bit of a shock. Most are relieved that things were "pretty OK" but some get a nasty surprise. Inevitably it is the poorer managers who get most shocks.

It may be difficult to explain how a person can be in a company for 25 years and a manager for a decade and still have so little idea of how others rate them? Psychologists often distinguish between three, but relate types of perception. The first is self-perception: how accurately people can ascertain their own ability and personality. Men tend to hubris and women tend to humility in assessing their abilities. And dozens of courses with personality questionnaires mean most middle managers can discuss in fluent psychobabble their own personality.

The second type of perception is other perception: how accurately you are able to diagnose others’ traits and states. That is, how good a judge of others you are: can you detect the very bright person from those pretending to be; can you assess neuroticism from an interview; and innovativeness from a C.V? It is a matter of being sensitive to cues and having some understanding of what behaviour means.

The third type of perception is called meta-perception: it is your perception of their perception of you. If you like you can have fun increasing the “metas” to have meta-meta-perception which is your perception of their perception of your perception of you. It means quite simply knowing at a lecture how you are “coming across”, or in the work place how others react to your management style. It means being able to “unpack” the meaning of such phrases as personality clash to help understand why people do and don’t get on. Managers often have strong preferences for doing things in a particular way; and those that report to them might have almost opposite preferences.

This can lead to tremendous tension and friction but if neither party can understand, perceive or articulate the causes or consequences of the process they seem condemned to mutual animosity. Being able to see and then explain how others perceive us is the essence of good meta-perception.

The failure of traditional appraisal systems and the number of consultants using and flogging 360 assessments in developmental centres means that feedback is in. HR people love it. It may be expensive but it can prove a safe way to give difficult people tough and anonymous feedback. It provides numbers and those can be aggregated over sections of the company to build up profiles. One can compare subordinate ratings in engineering vs. finance; and boss evaluation in marketing and HR itself. It thus provides simultaneously both counselling and measurement. Hence it’s popularity.

Indeed it is possible to find people who have been 360-ed half a dozen times. Feedback fatigue follows: flood after drought. Feedback is useful particularly if it tells one how to change behaviour; that is what to do both to maintain good performance but also to improve or correct weak performance.

But is feedback enough? There is a wonderful cartoon showing a man stroking a horse. He is saying: "You are a wonderful horse: perfect mane, gallop proudly, canter elegantly… blah, blah". And the horse looks up and says, "I said feedbag not feedback".

For the salesperson and those working largely on commission the monthly cheque (or feedbag) is the best record (feedback) of performance. More money = more sales = more success. Money is easy to measure and easy to use for comparisons. And it is a part measure of perceived worth. Certainly paucity of money (poor pay) may be a more powerful predictor of poor satisfaction than plethora (good pay) is of great satisfaction, but it cannot and should not be left out of the equation.

Pay and compensation are, in part, feedback. It is no good providing people with frequent 360’s which show they are "well above average", "extremely competent"; "ready for promotion" without echoing this in an equitably designed salary cheque. Equally, those who seem to get poor feedback need to see it reflected in their salary or promotion prospects.

It is all very well disguising feedback as a useful developmental technique. If it is any good it should be used as a serious mechanism to make pay, training, selection and promotional decisions. After giving and getting serious feedback it becomes necessary to work on the feedbag.  

Adrian Furnham is Professor of Psychology at University College London and author or Personality and Intelligence at Work pubished by Psychology Press (2008)