23 Apr BetterWorks CEO: Treat Feedback Like A Fitbit
We love feedback, but our enterprises do it all wrong. The CEO of BetterWorks wants employers to treat feedback more like a Fitbit.
People want to know how they are doing, and few of us feel like we hear it enough. Kris Duggan, CEO and founder of BetterWorks, believes that we’re bad at giving feedback to our employees, which keeps us from aligning work to business goals, makes employees less engaged and less productive, and keeps us all from reaching our full potential in the enterprise.
The good news is that there’s a quick fix: Treat employee feedback like Fitbit treats exercise.
“Imagine if your Fitbit gave you one annual report about the steps you take and you just had to guess how you were doing,” Duggan said in an interview with InformationWeek. “That’s essentially what most companies are doing today.”
The current annual employee evaluation tied to salary and promotion is the exact wrong way to get improvement from employees, he suggests.
Instead of an “arcane, over-engineered process” done once-a-year, Duggan suggests a high-frequency, lightweight process. Just as your Fitbit tells you each day whether you are taking enough steps or missing your goals, daily feedback helps you stay on track. Once a year just doesn’t cut it if you’re trying to get better. In fact, one study found at least 60% of us feel we haven’t heard useful feedback from our company in six months.
“It is all about tying feedback to process instead of people,” suggests Duggan.
This is where BetterWorks believes that it has something to offer. The company makes software that allows enterprises to track the individual goals of everyone in the company and makes those goals and the progress public for all in the enterprise.
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