24/7 employee feedback is here to stay, but is it always useful?
Last week I wrote an article for Growth Business about the launch of JP Morgan’s new 360-degree feedback tool.
While it’s good to see more companies adopting real-time feedback tools, organisations also need to make sure that these apps generate feedback that is “useful, rich, and relevant”.
I have enclosed an extract of the article below, and you can read the full article on Growth Business.
24/7 employee feedback is here to stay, but is it always useful?
Last week JP Morgan Chase took a giant step forward. Not in banking but in employee relations.
It announced the company is developing a new feedback tool, Insight360. The software will allow employees to rate each other, and their performance, in real-time.
But JP Morgan is not alone. They’re one of an increasing band of companies adopting real-time feedback systems. Some of the earliest adopters were the tech companies, like Amazon, and Goldman Sachs is experimenting with online feedback too.
Yet, contrary to popular belief, these systems have been largely welcomed by employees. In fact, for JP Morgan, it was the staff who requested it, suggesting that millennial employees really do like to know where they stand 24/7.
Employers need to remember it’s quality and not quantity that really matters
But, while real-time feedback software presents huge opportunities for both companies and staff, we need to stop ourselves falling into the trap of ‘more is always better’. It just isn’t.
Companies and people-managers are generally attracted to the idea that more feedback is better. Surely, the more information we have on our employees, the better the organisation will be.
But feedback is not an end in itself. Feedback is just data. It’s what you and your employees do with it that counts.
The whole purpose of feedback is to improve the performance of people. And we want them to improve so that the company can reach its goals. So feedback must do more than just count — it must give employees a sense of what they’re doing wrong — and right — over time; help them learn and empower them to make changes to the way they go about their business for the good of the company.
Ab Banerjee is Founder and CEO of ViewsHub (https://viewshub.com), the team feedback tool.
