Don’t underestimate the value of giving feedback – new research shows people want to receive it
Imagine you’re talking to someone and they have a big green piece of something they ate for lunch in their teeth. Do you tell them? Whether you do might depend on who they are (you might be more likely to tell your best friend than a work colleague) and perhaps your own personality too.
There’s no doubt many of us avoid giving feedback. It can feel awkward to tell somebody they have something in their teeth, or elsewhere. In a recent pilot study, less than 3 per cent of people told a researcher they had a mark, such as chocolate or a lipstick smudge, on their face.
Beyond issues relating to a person’s appearance, feedback more generally is vital for learning and growth. Students need feedback so they can improve their marks. In workplaces, feedback from managers can improve performance. We also give feedback in our personal lives – when we tell our partner the curry they cooked was too hot, or tell our kids to be more polite.
So why are we sometimes reluctant to provide feedback elsewhere? We might feel embarrassed, or wary that the feedback could upset the person receiving it, or even harm our relationship with them.
The researchers who conducted the pilot study I mentioned above have hypothesised that another reason we may be reluctant to give feedback is that we don’t realise how valuable it is to the person receiving it.
They decided to investigate this theory through a series of five experiments, involving close to 2,000 participants. Their results were recently published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
What they did
In the first experiment, the researchers asked participants to imagine either receiving or giving feedback in ten different workplace situations: for example if they or someone else had food stuck in their teeth, or there were typos in a presentation.
The researchers intentionally selected scenarios where feedback would help someone – things that could be rapidly fixed. They asked participants to rate on a scale of zero to ten how likely they would be to give feedback, or how much they would want to receive feedback in the scenario.
What they found was a giving-wanting gap: that is, the ratings people gave were generally higher when it came to their desire to receive feedback, compared to the likelihood of providing it to others.
In the second experiment, participants were asked to recall real-life situations in which they had received or given feedback, or had the opportunity to give feedback but hadn’t done so. Again there was a difference in how much people wanted feedback and their willingness to provide it.
Of course, experiments asking people to imagine or remember particular scenarios can only get us so far. The third experiment took place in a lab and involved pairs of friends, roommates or romantic partners providing genuine feedback. For example, one told the other that they should be more present, or that they take too long to get ready.
While less than half of the feedback givers wanted to provide feedback when given a choice, 86 per cent of people wanted to receive feedback, showing again the giving-wanting gap. Notably, the receivers rated the feedback as highly valuable.
In the fourth experiment, the researchers wanted to see if they could reduce this gap. The most effective method proved to be asking participants, based on having them recall an occasion where they could have provided feedback to someone else, to imagine receiving that feedback themselves. Would they want it?
Putting participants in the shoes of the feedback receiver significantly increased the likelihood that the feedback giver would recognise the need for and provide feedback. This suggests that our reluctance to give feedback has a lot to do with failing to appreciate its value.
The final experiment again involved pairs of people giving real feedback. This time, one member of the pair was practising a speech for a competition, while the other was assigned to listen and provide comments. To make the feedback more consequential, a prize was given for the best speech.
At various points during this experiment, both givers and receivers were asked different questions about the desire for and value of feedback. Once again, the researchers found a giving-wanting gap.
What can we make of all this?
The strength of this study lies in the consistency of findings across a range of scenarios: imagined feedback, memories of real feedback, and feedback in a lab setting. It’s clear that people generally want feedback – it’s valuable to them and allows them to improve.
But this study does have some limitations. As the authors acknowledge, it doesn’t consider the effects of power dynamics. For example, feedback from a senior manager to a junior colleague is going to be very different to feedback between friends. The study also doesn’t consider how often feedback is given. A friend who is constantly telling you how to improve is likely to get annoying quickly.
And of course, not all feedback is welcome by all people all the time. While feedback was generally valued and wanted in this study, this wasn’t true in every case. Further, participants giving real feedback in this study were doing so in an artificial setting.
Ultimately, we should still be careful about immediately diving in and telling anyone and everyone how they can improve. Constructive feedback should be specific, actionable, and delivered in a timely fashion. In many cases, asking someone if they would like your feedback can be a good start.
Pam Birtill, Associate Professor, School of Psychology, University of Leeds
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How to remain youthful and resilient despite stress
A bit of stress can be good for your mental and physical wellbeing, but too much can lead to anxiety, depression and other health problems. It can also make you age faster. So learning to become more stress-resilient is important if you’re not in a hurry to grow old fast.
Studies have shown that people who aren’t good at managing their stress can increase their risk of dying prematurely by 43 per cent. The increase in deaths might in part be due to the effect stress has on DNA.
DNA, which is found in nearly every cell (except red blood cells), contains genes that code for the building blocks (proteins) that comprise your body. DNA consists of two strands woven together in the famous “double helix”. Your cells are constantly making copies of themselves, and when a cell divides, the two strands unravel and an identical copy is made of each – well, most of the time.
Sometimes mistakes happen during the replication process, especially at the end of DNA strands. These mistakes can cause mutations in the copied DNA, leading to the cell becoming cancerous. Luckily, cells have protective caps called telomeres at the ends of the DNA strand that are designed to ensure these mistakes don’t happen.
Telomere caps are like sequences of beads (telomeric repeats). Each time the cell divides, the next generation loses one bead of telomeric repeats. Unfortunately, each cell has a fixed number of these repeats, meaning that it can only replicate a certain number of times before the protective telomere caps are eroded. This number of cell divisions is called the Hayflick limit. Once a cell reaches the Hayflick limit (up to 60 cell divisions, for most cells), it self-destructs (safely). This is the essence of ageing.
Some cells in the body, especially the immune cells that fight infection, possess molecules called telomerase. Telomerase can add the beads back (telomeric repeats) in immune cells (and some others, such as cancerous cells), meaning that ageing can be reversed in these cells. Telomerase can add the beads back, meaning that ageing can be reversed in the cells in question.
This makes sense as immune cells have to replicate many times to fight viruses and bacteria. Without telomerase, they would reach their Hayflick limit and disappear, leaving organisms with no protection. Unfortunately, however, even telomerase stops working properly when people reach their 80s and lose their immune cells to ageing.
It’s not all beyond your control
Smoking, excess alcohol consumption, being overweight and stress are all associated with telomere loss. Telomerase does not work as efficiently when a person suffers from excessive stress, and this causes premature ageing.
Adopting a healthy lifestyle, such as eating a plant-based diet, can stop and even reverse the process. And physical activity, especially intense exercise, can also increase telomerase activity. So leading a healthy life can decrease the speed of ageing as can managing your stress.
As we mentioned earlier, not all stress is bad. In psychology, we differentiate between “eustress” (positive stress), which is necessary for us to succeed at work, in sport and relationships, and “distress” (negative stress), when pressure becomes too much for us to manage. Distress is what most of us mean when we say or feel that we are stressed; it is also what might speed up ageing in your cells.
So there is no need to protect yourself from all stress, only the distress that lasts for a long time, is relentless and prevents you from living your life to the full.
Embracing stressful events and using coping strategies such as seeking help from friends or becoming resourceful when dealing with challenges, can create stress resilience, which in turn is associated with longer telomeres. Also, reappraising an anxiety-provoking event, such as taking on a public speaking engagement, by perceiving it as exciting can help you to manage stress. These techniques can stop eustress from becoming distress and enhance stress resilience.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back after adversity and become resistant to daily stressors. Besides problem-solving, social support and effective use of coping strategies, mindfulness can also help you become more resistant to daily stressors.
Other techniques include doing things that enhance your positive emotions, such as reading a book, listening to music, or playing a computer game. Experiencing positive emotions broadens your mind, allowing you to perceive and draw from your psychological, intellectual and social resources, especially when experiencing adversity.
We can’t yet be sure that these psychological strategies affect telomeres and by extension the ageing process. However, telomere length and telomerase activity in your cells do seem to be negatively affected by stress and positively affected by stress management. So if you have lifestyle changes you can make to help you develop stress resilience, you might want to adopt them. They might not make you live as long as an Arctic shark, but they could add some precious years onto your life.
Jolanta Burke, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Positive Psychology and Health, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences and Padraic J. Dunne, Lecturer, Centre of Positive Psychology and Health, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Why outcome management will shape the future of work
Up against agile newcomers, traditional structures are failing long-lasting market leaders. The answer is outcome management
Closing the gap between strategy and execution isn’t just a big challenge for many companies – it’s also an existential threat. Failing to do so could reduce a company’s lifespan by 30 per cent over the next seven years.
The cause lies in an ever-growing market dynamic that’s forcing companies to change their thinking, especially when it comes to traditional process, management and organisational structures. New competitors with fewer resources are challenging established players, moving quicker and winning in the market.
Take the automotive industry as an example: while VW needed decades to cut its original 10-year innovation cycle for the Golf in half, Tesla allowed just four years to pass between the announcement of Model X and its delivery. Traditional success factors, such as efficiency and stability, are taking a back seat. Adaptability and speed are the core competencies of new market leaders.
For quick, adaptable strategy execution, a new anchor that metrics, projects and teams can center themselves around, and a shift in thinking – from output-driven strategy execution to customer-centric outcome management – is necessary. After all, the future of work is not only shaped by new technologies and work models, but also requires fundamental structural changes in how organisations, collaboration and leadership function.
Input, output, outcome: the impact is what matters
To understand outcome management, it is important to consider what an outcome actually is:
- An outcome is primarily defined by the value it will generate for the customer
- This means the outcome also includes the benefiting customer
- However, it also includes the clear metrics that can be used to measure whether the desired value has been created
- In this context, an outcome is usually aligned with a higher-level business goal and/or a business KPI to which the outcome will contribute
- At the execution level, an outcome is also defined by the people and capacity needed for it as well as the initiatives that form the output and, as a result, the basis for reaching that outcome
Companies that practice outcome management concentrate on continuously creating value for their customers. This is because solved problems are what count for customers. To achieve this, goals, metrics, projects and teams are centred around shared outcomes. This gives communication and collaboration within and across teams a new anchor that ensures a common direction in the midst of change.
The four dimensions of outcome management.
What does it actually mean to implement outcome management? There are four specific areas that can be considered:
Setting a common strategic focus: while achieving strategic goals is a top priority for companies, studies show only 28 per cent of managers know the strategic priorities of their companies. A clear common strategic direction is vital. Markets are also becoming less predictable. Accordingly, companies need teams that understand the business strategy, quickly create independent outcomes and contribute to organisational goals, even when faced with constant change.
Aligning goals and teams: the biggest obstacle many CEOs face when it comes to successfully executing strategy is a lack of alignment and support from other teams. Unclear dependencies between teams and hierarchies often lead to serious capacity and prioritisation problems. However, with the proper processes and tools, alignment can be made simple and efficient. Aligning teams based on goals and capacity before the start of the strategy execution process can ensure optimal use of resources. This correlates with higher profitability and better fulfillment of revenue goals.
Working in an outcome-oriented manner: a lack of focus on strategic priorities during execution often means that the risk of not fulfilling outcomes goes unnoticed. This makes it impossible for management to course-correct early on. The key is to empower teams to concentrate on their most important results and learn from their progress. By continuously communicating priorities, identifying bottlenecks early and resolving them quicker, companies such as 3M and Roche were able to increase their performance by 20 per cent.
Continuously adapting the organisation: in many cases, executives fail to make the progress of their transformation efforts measurable. And while managers should be driving exactly this progress, they must often do so without support from a structured process. With the right information and a clearly structured transformation process, however, organisations can be empowered to work both within and on the system, and continuously develop the company. By consistently improving how they plan, align and execute around outcomes, organisations become better at achieving them.
At the organisational level, outcome management leads to strategies being quickly and reliably translated into business results, regardless of how market conditions and customer demands change. At the team level, shared outcomes lead to improved collaboration and clearer communication within and between teams. This, in turn, leads to less friction, more synergy, improved focus and, ultimately, increased efficiency.
Outcome-oriented work is becoming state of the art for any future-ready organization. Various methods and tools can help to implement this. Learn more about how outcome management can help your company turn strategies into real business results faster.
INDUSTRY VIEW BY WORKPATH
Deconstructing the future of work
Four-day weeks, on-demand pay, ‘rural’ talent, digital workers… in recent times, we’ve heard these ideas accompanied by seemingly teleological questions about work as a construct.
The timing is understandable given the confluence of factors at play – the rise of digital, labour pyramid issues and the after-effects of a global pandemic, including a desire for more meaning in work and convenience through remote work. After years of navel-gazing, society is finally waking up to the fact that our jobs, the way we do them, the time we spend and the very fundamentals of the nature of work itself are perhaps incongruent with the world we now live in. This realisation opens up the very promising possibility of re-examining and perhaps reconstructing work for the new era. But, beyond the clarion call, what exactly does it entail, how do we understand the future of work and how do we design for it? Fundamentally, we can break it down into three distinct components: the how, the where and the who.
Nature of work – how will work be done?
Digital technologies have truly come of age. From cloud to AI, we’ve been able to accelerate technology adoption to significantly enhance ways of working. Today, we have multiple ‘digital born’ businesses that are disrupting markets using technologies that only a decade or two ago were considered futuristic.
As we look at adoption of these technologies in the workplace, it becomes clear that the nature of work will change considerably. Robotic process automation (RPA) and AI-based automation can significantly reduce the number of transactional tasks to be delivered manually, in addition to a few judgement-oriented tasks. The universe of tasks that can be automated or streamlined will expand as these technologies mature. With cloud, AI and analytics, systems of record become more scalable, data pipelines can be streamlined and meaningful data itself becomes more accessible. This further enhances our ability to use data to derive insights and make informed decisions.
Everest Group’s future of work research shows that the adoption of these technologies has accelerated during the pandemic. More than 70 per cent of organisations have invested in digital in the past 12 months and about 50 per cent of those expect to invest more in the next six to 12 months. Naturally, all of this has implications for the kind of work that then falls to the human workforce. With transactional tasks largely automated, judgement-, expertise-, and empathy-oriented tasks and related skill sets (including ‘soft skills’) become more important. But this is not a gloom and doom job-loss scenario; digital hardly ever is. Digital will also create jobs for talent who can acquire skills related to automation, AI, analytics and the cloud.
In essence, the nature of work is changing. Enterprises will need to prepare for these eventualities by ensuring they have adequate skilling programmes in place, starting by building skill taxonomies for the future, assessing current skill sets and building out continuous learning, upskilling and reskilling programmes to enable a future-ready workforce.
Work location – where will work be done?
Our research indicates that over half of today’s enterprises expect more than 40 per cent of their employees to continue to work from home over the next two years or so. The pandemic has dispelled certain notions about remote work while highlighting its challenges. No longer do we question if remote work is efficient or even a possibility. Video calling and conferencing tools, collaboration technologies and the potential of the metaverse have meaningfully reduced the friction that deterred work from home. Employees have gained from shorter commute times, greater flexibility and proximity to family.
On the other hand, 55 per cent of enterprises see employee engagement as a key challenge in a remote-only environment, and 50 per cent see organisational culture as difficult to maintain with full-time work from home. The middle ground – hybrid work – seems destined to be a key component of the future, and enterprises need to design their environments for this reality, redesigning physical and virtual workspaces, embedding information security as needed and changing management styles to accommodate the hybrid working model.
As remote working has gained more acceptance and mature economies have aged, the time has also come to de-link talent from geographic location. Beyond the US and India, emerging technologies such as AI and automation have sizeable talent pools in multiple countries across the world. The enterprise of the future should seek to leverage this talent, applying similar guiding principles as those for hybrid work with additional focus on local compliance, managing cross-cultural teams and customising policies.
INDUSTRY VIEW BY EVEREST GROUP
Drink problems at work got much worse during the pandemic – here’s how employers can tackle them
The Downing Street “partygate” scandal has shown how alcohol use can be embedded in the everyday workplace. The internal investigation being led by senior civil servant Sue Gray is expected to make clear how normalised the culture of drinking has become within the centre of government under Boris Johnson’s administration.
But this culture of drinking in the workplace is not restricted to government, of course. We know that drinking carries a heavy cost for employers in terms of work absences and reduced productivity – including when it is happening outside work.
Alcohol interferes with sleep, particularly the quality of sleep, making people tired, less able to concentrate, and less likely to do well at tasks that require motor coordination. And more generally, alcohol misuse is a leading cause of disability, ill health and death in the UK.
One major concern is that the Covid pandemic may have made it easier for employees to drink more alcohol while working from home. The World Health Organization recognised some time ago that this change in working practice could lead to a rise in alcohol consumption and provided advice on how to manage this.
New research covering the period of the pandemic has subsequently revealed the dramatic rise in drinking among those who were deemed to be high-risk drinkers prior to the pandemic. These risks include not only developing psychological and physical dependence but a range of health problems including cancer and heart issues.
By the end of October 2021 in the UK, this group of high-risk people rose to an estimated 8 million – up from 6 million in February 2020. It’s easy to imagine how changes such as working from home could have contributed to this.
Many employees have seen their colleagues less frequently as meetings and conversations have been conducted virtually, meaning that problematic drinking is less likely to be detected or managed. We also know that people tend to pour larger measures when at home and lose the social cues around the pace of drinking which they would get in a pub or bar.
It’s not just about having the opportunity to drink more that the change in working practice has produced; it is the additional toll that this and other restrictions have on workers’ mental health. Alcohol is very effective in the short term for mitigating feelings of isolation, unhappiness, stress and a lack of hope – all factors that are known to have risen during the pandemic.
Yet in the longer term, drinking can increase the risk of anxiety and depression. So while some people may use alcohol to cope with work-related stress and other negative feelings, it can end up contributing to them.
Employers and alcohol policies
Early in the pandemic, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) published a report highlighting the need for UK employers to have effective policies in place for problems with alcohol. The research found that in the previous two years, one third of employers had disciplined an employee and a fifth had dismissed an employee due to alcohol use. Training for line managers was particularly poor, with only 12 per cent having been given specific training on procedures and policy in relation to alcohol.
This raised the issue of how we all view problems with alcohol. Too many people, including employers, see getting drunk as self-inflicted or a “bad” choice made by the employee. This view of alcohol as a set of one-off incidents at work which requires employer intervention unfortunately misses the reasons why people develop problems with it.
Instead of viewing alcohol problems as a disciplinary matter, employers need to see them as a health issue. Though there is no legal requirement that employers have policies to deal with alcohol at work, or allow time off work for treatment, these kinds of supportive policies are shown to have positive outcomes for employees and employers. The CIPD report showed that where employers had referred a worker to specialist alcohol treatment, 69 per cent continued to work for the organisation.
Of all the drugs that people use, alcohol takes more time and regular exposure to develop a dependency. Many people at high risk are functional drinkers: they continue to work, have relationships, and outwardly appear unaffected.
This can make it difficult to discern when they have a problem, and it will often require the person to own up to it first. Many won’t want to do this because it comes with so much fear and stigma, but it’s more likely to happen where they know their employer will respond supportively and without judgement.
The only intervention the government has made on alcohol during the pandemic is to ensure uninterrupted access to the drug. As Covid took hold in 2020 and restrictions were put in place, the government placed off-licences in the same category as pharmacies, deeming them to be “essential services”. So although pubs, bars and restaurants were closed people could still buy alcohol from off-licences and supermarkets.
The focus on “partygate” is a good moment for employers to reconsider their policies and procedures for dealing with alcohol and work, but also how far problems such as work-related stress exacerbate problems with alcohol. As has been apparent from all the recent Downing Street headlines, the government and civil service seem to be no exception.
Ian Hamilton, Associate Professor of Addiction, University of York and Lisa Rodgers, Associate professor, labour law, University of Leicester
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.