One Minute HR Consultant

One would be hard pressed to find an organization not impacted by the current state of affairs, which include calls for or against financial regulatory reform, restricted access to capital for SMB(s), and a flurry of legislation and executive orders impacting how we  conduct operations and relate to  our employees. 

Perhaps your organization is being impacted by one of these factors, but an assumption is that a combination of these factors is having an impact on  your company.  It is during these times that ambiguity increases despite well-intentioned efforts to prevent otherwise.  One of the things that we as leaders need to focus our efforts (both individually and collectively) is on continuous communication and feedback. 

The danger of organizational ambiguity can have profound impacts, which  contribute to the factors mentioned earlier and taken together result in organizational politics.  Organizational politics itself manifests within our employees in the form of  stress, intentional and unintentional discrimination, and at the extreme, turnover. 

Thus feedback should consider multiple formats addressing areas to include employee performance, organizational direction-visioning, and business goals.  Your key objective as a leader is to maintain or improve performance so that your organization maintains or ideally improves effectiveness and its ability to  accomplish its organizational objectives.  Presented below are three ways to enhance feedback and create an open-feedback culture that ideally will increase morale, diminish the impact of organizational politics, and contribute to increased profitability, readiness, and affiliation with organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs):

1.  Ensure employees have access to relevant information regarding their performance.  This includes, but certainly not limited to individual efforts within the context of accomplishing organization, unit, division and department objectives.  With this access, senor leaders, managers, and supervisors should encourage open dialogue on not only the importance of the job, but how an employee’s job performance can improve at the individual level and mapping the linkage to organizational performance. 

2.  Provide informal and formal feedback outside of performance appraisal interviews.  As I persistently state within blogs, lectures, round tables, etc. is that performance discussions should not be limited to appraisal feedback sessions.  When you, as a leader, take the time to discuss employees’ performance in settings outside of performance appraisal review sessions and interviews, you are increasing trust-building and decreasing the impact of perceived organizational politics.  

3.  Discuss importance of job performance, teamwork, and feedback as it relates to desired OCB.  Integrate what your organization stands for as often as possible.  Your goal is to impact the subconscious work efforts of employees to align their behavior with organizational goals – that is always the number one objective.  Once your employees understand how their work behavior/performance outcome contributes to the organization’s ability to accomplish its objective, you have again decreased ambiguity and set a clear standard of performance. 

In the end, you, as a leader, must exercise the behavior and activities associated with transformational leadership during difficult times.  These are difficult times at some level and through your consideration of employees’ perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes as it relates to their job, job performance, job accomplishment, and job security, you will go a long way in enhancing organizational performance through increased productivity  and morale while at the same time create an atmosphere conducive to feedback, information sharing, and building trust.