Discriminating use of feedback is necessary: there’s just too much of it to act on, otherwise! But we’ve chosen the wrong criteria.
Humans do not act logically. Humans act based on their feelings, their emotions, and past experiences. Human behavior is contextualized within the actual environment they are in. More important than the actual environment is a person’s perception of their environment. In fact, the only time we employ logic is to validate our perception of reality. Consider the world of sports or the realm of relationships: people don’t just ignore reality, they fight against it!
Motivation and productivity are games of psychology, empathy, and subtlety. If you want to decrease employee churn, you must understand how the human creature actually functions.
People make choices based on their perception of their environment.
Logic doesn’t play into it at all.
Business standard behavior denies this reality, and has chosen to focus only on cold, hard, heartless data. There is a misunderstanding that “data doesn’t lie” – which is true only in the sense that data is not sentient and therefore incapable of lying.
Data can be manipulated. Incomplete. Misunderstood. Obscured. Data can be made to say literally anything. This is because data is, in its essence, meaningless. It is literally devoid of meaning beyond existing. Humans imbue data with meaning. If you’re skeptical, go peruse the American news networks.
Data is, essentially, devoid of meaning.
We imbue data with meaning.
If data is meaningless and can be manipulated to tell any story we want…why do we insist on only using data? I can think of half a dozen self-serving reasons in as little time as it takes me to type them. They’re all along the same vein: we rely on data to plausibly deny reality and responsibility. We insist on “data” because it reinforces our existing beliefs. We rely solely on data because that’s what everyone else is doing...despite the fact it rarely solves anything.
By fixating on our convenient interpretation of data, we shut down an incredibly useful and actionable resource: employee feedback. If an employee has had such an excellent experience working in your company that they have an emotional response, that’s important. (It’s also a data point, by the way.) If an employee has had such a terrible experience that they are emotionally reacting, that’s important as well.
Why does “emotional” feedback only matter when it comes to customers?
Because customers are the ones handing us cash, of course.
Emotional feedback is ridiculed by many large companies. It is considered “not useful.” Especially if it’s negative. Thousands of employees who care about their company’s performance go to their leaders with emotional, charged feedback because the employee experience is so terrible that it hurt them.
The standard response: “Oh, that’s too emotional, we can’t act on that. You need to give us a logical argument, and come back with data. Until that point, we refuse to act on it. Maybe the problem is you.”
How motivated do you think that employee feels? Do you think they’ll ever trust their leader enough to report an internal issue again?
We can’t just manufacture customers. We need to make them feel important, because they’ll give us money. But despite the fact that our employees are the ones who interact with these paying customers, and these employees give us their time and energy and effort – we don’t see them as important. We devalue the employee’s human experience by relying solely on data and ignoring their emotional feedback.
Imagine a company which efficiently tracked emotional data, proactively responded to emotional responses, and employed additional targeted research to concerns which were reported by emotionally-charged feedback. Imagine a company which followed up with such employees, spoke with their peers to honestly uncover a potential flaw? Imagine a company where the leaders were vulnerable enough to say, “You’re right, we’re wrong, and this needs fixed.”
That’s the world I dream about. That’s the world I want my children to work in.