Feedback – not waving but drowning?

You’d be forgiven for believing that the communicator’s world will shortly be deluged by an over-abundance of feedback, since people are being asked to give their view on everything they buy. I’ve just ordered some groceries online – first time in ages – and was interested to see that every product had customer reviews attached to it. I started off reading each of them and then realised that this would more than double my shopping time – isn’t this supposed to save me time? It doesn’t, because as you’d expect, some people thought one product tasted great while another said it was awful. So in fact very little of it actually helped.

In the internal communications world, we have always been taught that feedback is paramount and certainly we can’t do our jobs properly if we don’t know that messages have landed as we thought they would, or there is a burgeoning issue we need to know about.

So it’s got to be a good thing, right? Good that people have a voice, somewhere to express a view that ‘management’ doesn’t hover over with a big stick. Not constrained by what’s asked in a survey, people are free to pick a topic and share it with everyone, just say what’s on their mind. So there is a good flow of information back and the people responsible for the subject in question will receive this feedback, welcome it with open arms and form a plan to redress any issues. Nice theory.

So what’s wrong with it? Not all feedback is actionable, or even useful beyond knowing that someone feels the subject is worthy of comment. Some of it will be a stream of consciousness, without self-regulation, a knee-jerk reaction.  Some of it will be unfair. This can make the recipients get defensive and dismissive. They are busy and not in the mood to wade through piles of stuff they can do nothing about to get to the lovely chunky bits of feedback that will help them improve what they’re doing.  

One way that internal comms can add value is by synthesising this feedback, joining it with information from other sources (cascade feedback, employee surveys, polls, intranet comments and so on) and providing stakeholders with a report that gives the main areas of interest, good and bad points. Then employees will know they are being listened to, and the stakeholders have something meaningful and actionable. Any thoughts or experiences?