At the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology conference this week in Brighton, a study has reported that if you want a happier and healthier workforce you need to tell your boss what you think of him/her.
The positive effects of doing this are that managers can get direct feedback from their workforce which will help them develop and improve their management style. In addition, if done correctly, at the right time and in the right circumstances, a better relationship between boss and employee can be forged. Achieving these outcomes is not always easy though. Many firms employ 360 degree appraisal systems, but these are often infrequent and fail to include this kind of direct feedback. For a meaningful and constructive relationship to be formed between manager and employee it takes time, personal investment and a certain level of skill on both sides.
So how can we make sure that this interaction is a positive one? The difficulty of giving the boss negative feedback is that he/she might not want to hear it. There are managers who have strong needs for control, who want to maintain the barrier between them and their direct reports and who just aren’t ready to be given any negative feedback. In addition, there are many employees who are feeling so job insecure during this downturn that they would be reluctant to say anything negative to their boss for fear of job loss or damage to their promotion prospects. However, neither party in this situation is doing the right thing for the organisation – it’s critical that managers understand that it is their role to listen to how staff feel and that staff are willing to speak up.
Receiving negative feedback is never easy, but there are ways in which it can be done that will ensure that it is more effective and better received. For example, it must be done at a time and place when both parties are in the right frame of mind and not under business pressure. The purpose of the feedback and the process for delivering it should be discussed in advance so that both parties are clear about the context and ground rules. Finally, and most importantly, the feedback must be constructive rather than blaming or irrational – the onus is on the employee to have thought through why it is important that their manager hears this feedback. They need to have definite ideas about what will improve for staff and the business as a result of the manager changing his/her behaviour. One way of keeping the feedback concrete is to use specific examples of problem behaviours and situations that could be improved so that the changes required by the boss are tangible.
Getting this right is no mean feat, but the research shows that when this is done well it can improve the health and well-being of employees. So although it may be difficult, it is important for all managers to set the right tone for constructive feedback in their teams and organisations. When managers understand how they are perceived by their employees it’s good for everyone.
I suppose since a great deal of research implicates managers as the major cause of challenges to employee well-being, not to mention the reason 1/3 of all employees cite for leaving – and these are typically the happy well adjusted ones a company would otherwise want to keep – people with low states of psychological well-being tend to stay on and on – dragging the company down with chronic presenteeism. So to “telling you boss what you think of him” I say “hurrah! “But who will bell the proverbial cat? The ease of this solution looms before my eyes…but first where do I find this BPS report?