How can I use People Success Habits as keys to transformation?
How to make People Success a reality?
Feedback
Leaders and managers gain timely and meaningful insights through real-time feedback and continuous conversations. In turn, insights lead to better informed decisions and actions that drive both employee and company success.
Many organizations survey employees once a year to gather feedback. A People Success approach suggests developing a habit of more frequent, brief surveys, which only include questions that speak to current priorities, with manager-employee conversations that follow immediately after the survey closes.
Conversations
Few managers have mastered the art of having conversations that are meaningful and propel progress. A habit of ongoing conversations is critical to acting on feedback because:
- Conversations signal that we want to take action on feedback and provide a forum for understanding the data at a deeper level.
- Conversations that are productive provide clarity and focus: Are we on the same page for what we need to solve?
- Conversations make the process inherently collaborative. No one person feels at risk of taking action alone.
- Conversations are self-correcting. If you check in regularly, the plan evolves over time and accountability to act naturally occurs.
- Conversations can occur with all the above benefits regardless of whether a survey goes out.
People often avoid important conversations because:
- It’s not always clear how to facilitate a good conversation and therefore the potential value feels unclear.
- Conversations about feedback can feel awkward and/or intimidating.
The ACT Conversation Guide
We developed the ACT Conversation Guide as a simple framework for productive conversations that foster meaningful connection and continuous improvement. The framework allows managers and teams to practice the steps of a quality feedback conversation and make it a habit that stays with them.
- Acknowledge where we are
- Collaborate on where we want to go
- Take one step forward
Why ACT Works
The conversation guide is built on a combination of behavioral science and practical expertise on what fuels change within organizations. ACT is fundamentally intended to:
- Appreciate each other and reinforce the positive. In ‘Acknowledge’, we encourage kicking things off by sharing positive stories of progress witnessed in the last few months. This ensures we focus on the positive in addition to what needs to improve.
- Foster an environment of ongoing learning. By focusing less on achieving a goal and more on ongoing learning, we create a growth mindset where we persist in the face of obstacles, embrace challenges, and seek inspiration from others. The ‘Acknowledge’ conversation prompts nudge the team to share what is working and what’s not working, in ongoing check-in meetings. During the ‘Collaborate’ phase, we encourage deconstructing what we need to start, stop, and continue doing to improve outcomes.
- Get to the root of the behaviors that help or hinder progress. It’s common for eager teams to tackle a problem by creating a new solution to address it. With all the right intentions, we add new things to do without taking anything away. Often, change requires as much undoing as doing. It’s especially critical to talk openly about what we need to stop doing. This is important for two reasons: it creates focus and it makes it OK for team members to dissent and be open and proactive about derailers.
- Drive focus. We know focus is critical to effectiveness, yet we too often forget to prioritize how we act on feedback. It’s not uncommon for leaders to become overwhelmed by the number of issues that arise in their survey feedback and overcommit to solving everything all at once. The result is that organizational energy and resources are often diluted, and nothing fundamentally changes. The use of one in ‘Take one step forward’ is intentional to keeping team commitments manageable and bite sized.
- Identify individual commitment. Social theory shows that when you believe responsibility is diffused, you are less likely to make an effort to solve it. If you believe that improving team morale and engagement is someone else’s problem, it’s unlikely you will play your part in making things better. While managers have a clear role to play, each member of the team can influence the outcome. This is why in ‘Take One Step Forward,’ we encourage individual commitments for progress and when to check-in next.
- Create an agile, continuous improvement mindset. Our research has shown that the organizations that have an agile approach to People Success are more likely to see business success. At the heart of an agile approach is that we can’t always get it right the first time and that the business context is constantly changing. We must continuously learn from mistakes and iterate, rather than over-index on developing a detailed plan.
Having meaningful conversations that drive connection and focus is hard because it requires under-utilized and under-practiced skills. By providing a simple framework focused on building the right habits, we can make it repeatable enough that it feels like a normal part of work. Once we can build managers’ muscles around feedback and connection, conversations become habits that propel action and continuous improvement, without dependencies on HR.
Goal setting
Leaders often fear that if they don’t show that they are acting on all opportunities identified in a survey, they are perceived as disconnected or non-inclusive. Because no organization can solve every problem in one moment, focusing on the most critical insights that align to the business and team priorities is the best way to ensure meaningful progress.
To prioritize action, put survey feedback into the context of the business goals you are trying to achieve. When acting on feedback feels separate from your business priorities, it is likely to feel burdensome. We always recommend that teams look at their survey data through the lens of, “What do we need to accomplish as a team in the next three to six months, and what do the survey results say about our ability to do that?”
By putting feedback in the context of strategic objectives, you’re not working on something new - you’re working more effectively toward a current priority. Viva Glint’s technology quickly narrows focus on insights that are the most impactful to supporting a team’s engagement and performance. Our highly intuitive reporting considers both context and relevance at the right level to provide managers with a simple, yet highly actionable, summary of their strongest qualities and greatest opportunities to grow. This allows managers at all levels to quickly glean insights so they can transition to acting on the feedback they have received.
Action taking
Now that you have thought about your People Success strategy, it’s important to understand and outline the process that you need to mobilize your people and implement technology. Developing a People Success process in your organization can start small and build in scope over time.
In our research, we have seen compelling evidence that action taking is critical. When action is taken by managers, a single quarter is enough for marked and meaningful increases in scores across teams of varying sizes and initial score levels. Employees who don’t believe action is taken are 7x more likely to report being disengaged compared to those who believe action will be taken. Teams that score high on action taking are significantly more likely to say that they have confidence in the leadership team and are excited about the prospects of the company.
It is therefore important to leverage ongoing conversations to fuel action taking. Use the ACT Conversation Guide to empower your managers to take one step forward on one Focus Area (goal) to improve their team's experience.