Removing stress from feedback

Removing the stress from feedback

Karen Rayner Feedback Leave a Comment

When our brain senses a threat, our body activates a threat response. It’ll go into some form of defensive behavior and lock down most functions that aren’t necessary for survival. It’s what we rely on to keep us alive when we’re confronted by an angry bear. And, as it turns out, when we have to deal with feedback at work. SCARF To illustrate how feedback constitutes a threat, we can take a look at the SCARF framework from David Rock. It lays out a range of things that can trigger a social threat and create stress: Status: talking to a person of higher …

The role of psychological safety in workplace Health & Safety

Karen Rayner Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback, Health & Safety Leave a Comment

For many, ‘safety’ means physical safety: PPE, hazard registers and accident prevention. But psychological safety at work is just as important. “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.” – Amy Edmondson Psychological safety is what enables us to speak up, and to take calculated risks without the fear of reprimand. This matters to workplace Health & Safety initiatives for a number of reasons. Empowerment When people feel psychologically safe they are more comfortable making decisions for themselves. If there’s no policy or procedure for the …

Encouraging feedback from introverts

Encouraging feedback from introverts

Karen Rayner Employee experience, Feedback Leave a Comment

Quiet doesn’t (always) mean disengaged. You may have team members you seldom hear from in meetings, or who don’t always step up with feedback or input. It doesn’t mean they don’t care, or that they have nothing to say; they may simply not be wired for speaking out. It’s easy to overlook the quiet workers, but it would be a mistake to think they have nothing to offer… You don’t want to get into the habit of only listening to the loud voices. Just because they’re loud doesn’t mean they’re right, or that their opinions are shared by everyone (or …

Active listening in online conversations

Practicing active listening in online conversations

Ruby Kolesky Employee experience, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment

I think of myself as a leader being placed somewhere on a value based spectrum, with efficiency on one end and empathy on the other. As an individual contributor, I started my career all the way on the efficiency end of the spectrum. I believed that talking to people about their feelings was a waste of time. Turns out, that’s not true at all. Leaders who value efficiency over empathy tend to sacrifice investing time in relationships with their team members. The result? Ironically, team efficiency is negatively impacted. Why? Because team members who don’t have close relationships with their …

Genesis launching in lockdown

Launching in lockdown: Genesis

Karen Rayner Engagement, Feedback, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

The world’s changed a lot since we first started working with Emma-Kate Greer and Tamara Sallis from Genesis, an energy company in New Zealand. Genesis has over 1,000 employees spread across the country in a wide range of roles including retail, wholesale operations, delivery and customer service. It’s an essential service provider, so work continues for the Genesis team even under lockdown conditions – the electricity must flow. This week Emma-Kate and Tamara launched Joyous across Genesis, and used the launch as an opportunity to send Covid-19 check-in questions to the entire team. So to see how well the launch …

Make difficult conversations simple

A simple approach to difficult conversations

Ruby Kolesky Employee experience, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment

About two years into my career as an engineering team leader I had to have a difficult conversation. The conversation was with Connor (not his real name), a junior engineer, who had recently joined our team. Connor was consistently arriving to work late, taking long lunches, and leaving early. As his team lead I knew that I needed to talk to him, so I arranged a meeting: difficult conversations should always take place in person. Not long before this, I had attended a leadership training course lead by Nick Reid, from Training for Change. So, I used the SCORE approach …

We need to talk about your anonymous feedback

Hi Kelly. We need to talk about your anonymous feedback.

Michael Carden Employee experience, Feedback Leave a Comment

If you can figure out whose feedback you’re reading from what it says, how it’s said, or by applying basic data filters, then guess what? Your feedback isn’t anonymous. Cautionary tale 1: anonymous feedback is the enemy of specificity Ken’s had a rough month dealing with issues in the very specialised reports that he owns. So he has a choice to make at feedback time. Does he: a) give open and honest feedback on the reporting problems in the hopes that this feedback leads to changes in the process and less frustration in future, or b) not say anything about …

Employee feedback - getting started

Employee experience feedback: a quick guide to getting started

Karen Rayner Employee experience, Feedback Leave a Comment

Quick recap: employee experience is everything people perceive, think, feel, do or encounter at work. If this experience is negative it can lead to poor performance, low engagement and unfavorable business results. So you really want EX to be positive, and to make sure, you need to ask employees for their feedback. Getting started with EX feedback Talking to people is one of the best ways to understand what’s going on in your teams. So, don’t worry about investing in tech when you’re first starting your EX journey; just get talking! You can build from there. Talk it out Collecting …

Voice of the Employee

Using Voice of the Employee to improve customer experience

Michael Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback 1 Comment

Most companies understand the value of Voice of the Customer surveys. If you want to know how customers feel and what aspects of customer experience you can improve, you ask them. Makes sense. Voice of the Employee follows a similar philosophy. You ask employees how they feel and what you can improve. They’re most likely going to have some feedback on their employee experience that you can do something with. In the case of front-line staff, they’re also going to hook you up with some information on customers that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Which means VoE is not only good …

eNPS employee engagement

Using eNPS as an indicator of engagement

Kai Crow Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment

Employee NPS (eNPS) is based on Net Promoter Score® (NPS™) by Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. It’s commonly used as a quick indicator of employee engagement because engaged (and loyal) employees are more likely to recommend their workplace. NPS recap NPS measures customer loyalty by asking: ‘How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or relative?’ The idea is that loyal customers believe so strongly in the company they’re recommending that they’re willing to put their reputation on the line for it. Friends and relatives are typically the people we feel most strongly …

We need to have a conversation about engagement

Karen Rayner Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback Leave a Comment

Numbers are easy*. Anyone can take an employee survey and make something of it: response rate is obvious, unhappy and engaged answers easily coded. We can chart results and turn them into reports and pretty infographics with a bare minimum of effort. 77% of employees hate the food in the cafeteria! 31% of millennials in Townsville stay for the beanbags! Numbers, saving us from too much thinking since forever. Unfortunately, numbers are also simple. Surveys in particular condense a whole heap of potentially mind-blowing information into a single, easily digestible figure. Say I discover that only 31% of employees think …

The observer effect is not about cats in boxes

The observer effect:  the surprising role of structured questions

Philip Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback, Motivation

How do we measure things like engagement and experience? We ask questions. But what if asking the question changes the very thing we are trying to measure? Here’s a newsflash: That’s exactly what happens. And it’s not a bad thing — in fact it’s a huge opportunity, because the questions themselves can be subtle but powerful change agents. The observer effect: simply observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes that phenomenon (a fact commonly cited in physics). We’re huge fans of open questions, but here are three good reasons why interactions should start with carefully chosen structured questions. Three good reasons that …

The anonymity paradox

The Anonymity Paradox

Michael Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback 1 Comment

Communication is a spectrum. On the left is face to face. On the right is a YouTube comment section. In the middle are all manner of different ways of connecting. Bluetooth phone calls while driving. Group WhatsApp with those folk you met at a festival. Teleconferences where one dude is at an airport and only ever remembers to press mute before he starts talking. Each of these different ways of communicating has its own rules of acceptable behavior. There’s probably things you’d say in an email that you’d not say face to face. I’ve certainly found myself on written rants …