Obituary of Feedback!

Feedback in the organizational context was developed in the 1940s and 50s when systems perspective was being applied to companies. The organization is assumed to be a complex and interdependent open system. Systems theory believes that organizations are capable of adapting and improving over time; and that the collection and use of information can help organizations adapt and improve.

David A Nadler offered one of the simplest step wise solution to the businesses through his book Feedback and Organizational Development: Using data- based methods (An Addison Wesley Publishing). He then emphasized the role of stakeholders in achieving the functional and business related goals. Feedback from customers, vendors, and employees has been there since long and had in short contributed to significant success overall as feedback gave the business an opportunity to hear directly from the horse’s mouth and set things right.

Having said this, that feedback as a tool can help organizations succeed, but overtime it has lost its significance. Many functions of an organization use feedback mainly the HR function in the form of feedback, surveys, etc. The purpose with which feedback as a tool took birth back then fails to meet same purpose in the current days. This valuable tool has just become a tick mark item (my boss generally uses this term to those activities which do not have any strategic value).

I remember during the feedback time of the Learning & Development sessions which I had attended, I saw myself ticking only Strongly Agree or the maximum rating available and leaving the comments box saying, ‘everything was perfect’ in an attempt to finish it quick and most importantly in an attempt to please the person asking for feedback.

There is a growing concern with respect with feedback which is going unreported/unnoticed/even if noticed-swept under the carpet. Getting a true feedback is indeed a task at hand. With this as a background, I would now like to express my views on the feedback obtained by the L&D function. Over my experience with 6 companies (as an intern and during my current job), I have seen quite a lot of feedback forms of the L&D team. To my view, those feedback forms are not advanced (advanced meaning not capable of tracking incorrect feedback). Many feeders are generally on the run to finish a feedback form, and few if not many are on the verge to give good ratings just to ensure that the trainer is safe, and at the same time there are also few who are completely mesmerized by the trainers presentation/communication/humour, etc. that they sincerely feel that he/she deserves a good rating only to realise that participants have only been thrilled for those few hours present in the training room, and nothing of much importance has been taught, even if taught, it’s not applicable to their present job.

The result of such feedbacks is:

On Paper: Overall Rating of the Training Program: 5/5

Actual (in terms of skill orientation/upgradation): Overall rating of the training Problem: 2/5

In almost all of these cases, the 5/5 is a hypothetical number only on paper, using which the trainer may get carried away at his impeccable performance, but the reality is that he is only rated very low in terms of actual content and enhancement of skills which is not reported.

A good rating has nowadays become a hypothetical floor! If out of 100 training programs conducted, what if 99 programs were rated 4.5 on an average, does this mean success? Probably Yes on Paper! But in the true sense, does it? Heck NO! L&D function is nowadays losing it owing to this 4.5 number out of 5 on paper.

There are some areas which have to be fixed before the L&D interventions seem to surface out at the workplace/on the job. In my view testing the reliability of the ratings is by far crucial thing realise the quality of a rating either good or bad. A feedback should be a mix of positive and negative coded questions so as to ensure that the participant is giving a feedback in no hurry and only after reading and understanding the parameter thoroughly. Once these questions (positive and negative) are in place, then all one has to do is run a correlation test between the ratings to bust the racquet. This way once can at least ensure to segregate the actual data from the false.

And secondly, nowadays feedback forms without preserving the anonymity have become the latest fad! Agreed that if we want to track the participant’s key takeaways from the training program we need to know the person, but it defeats the purpose of having a feedback. Imagine a situation where I am writing my name on the feedback form and me giving a bad rating to the program due to some reason. In all possibility I will get a call the next day asking why I dint like the program and that resulting in me being the soft target to be rebuked. The fear of being caught to express freely can also drive a person to fake his feeding process back. Maintaining the anonymity of the feeder is a prime responsibility if one has to know exactly what is good and what the areas of improvement are.

For an effective training to happen, feedback should be more than a questionnaire, it got to be advanced like a survey sheet of a research graduate, and the analysis too have to be of the same fashion. If in the future L&D has to be more accountable and it should get more jazzy and advanced like a band of researchers creating a clever feedback survey, churning out insights from data, and the ACTING UPON IT.