Latest news with #employee engagement
Fast Company
11-08-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
The leadership strategy that's more valuable than performance reviews
BY Having been on both sides of the table—as employee and manager—I can confidently say that no one looks forward to annual performance reviews. As an employee, you might find yourself bracing for critiques and rehearsing defenses. Maybe you're asked to rate your own performance and feel unsure whether to play it humble or confident. And that's before you even start combing through an entire year's worth of highs and lows. Employers are likewise tasked with the time-consuming exercise of digging through months of work for each employee. But the real issue isn't just that annual reviews are stressful—it's that they're often ineffective. They can leave employees feeling frustrated and disengaged. Meanwhile, organizations continue to waste time on systems that do little to meaningfully improve performance or support career growth. Some even rank employees, pitting them against each other in a race that completely undermines the spirit of collaboration. I know that kind of atmosphere would not work for my company. Today's employees want something different: timely, ongoing feedback that helps them improve in the moment. It's not just a more psychologically gentler approach—it also delivers results. In fact, the percentage of U.S. companies using annual reviews dropped from 82% in 2016 to just 49% in 2023, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. It's no doubt due to the benefits of real-time feedback. Here's a closer look at some of those advantages. Real-time feedback accelerates improvement Imagine you're a line cook in a restaurant. You've been preparing a dish from the spring/summer menu the same way for months. Then, in September, your sous chef informs you that you've been leaving out a key ingredient all along. The feedback comes too late to matter—you're already moving on to the fall menu. Delayed feedback, in short, is unhelpful. 'Annual reviews are too infrequent for the cycle of work today in most enterprises,' says James N. Baron, a professor at Yale School of Management. 'Goals negotiated at the beginning of the year have often become obsolete and irrelevant by the end-of-year review.' That's why more and more organizations are shifting away from annual reviews. Timely feedback allows employees to adjust quickly. Baron advocates for real-time coaching, in which managers work directly alongside their team members. When leaders stay close to the work, their feedback is immediate and actionable. But when they're removed from day-to-day operations—when they're too far from the trenches—they can't possibly understand where employees need to improve. At AstraZeneca, managers adopted a more hands-on coaching approach. Four years later, the company saw a 12% increase in core coaching capabilities and a 70% boost in managers' confidence in leading meaningful coaching conversations. Ongoing feedback makes the coaching process more effective and manageable for managers as well. Frequent feedback boosts motivation and morale As my company's workforce increasingly includes millennial and Gen Z employees, I've seen a steady rise in the desire for continual feedback. While younger workers are sometimes unfairly labeled as overly sensitive, in my experience, they welcome constructive criticism, especially when it helps them grow and move closer to their career goals. Companies that want to attract and retain top talent are taking note. Regular, informal check-ins offer another advantage: They turn feedback into a dialogue rather than a one-sided annual monologue. This helps employers better understand their employees' career goals and collaborate on aligning those goals with the company's broader objectives. These conversations shift from sources of dread to wellsprings of motivation. Simply put, ongoing feedback helps keep people on track, ideally in a direction that serves both their personal development and the company's success. More feedback, less fear: Shifting the tone of evaluation In the annual review process, there's often a performative element in which leaders feel compelled to balance praise with critique, regardless of what's warranted by the actual employee's performance. Whether it's delivered as a compliment sandwich or a straight-up list of pros and cons, the experience can leave employees feeling dissatisfied and deflated. The mere word 'feedback' from a manager can trigger an employee's threat response, flooding the brain with adrenaline and making it harder to process and act on what's being said. In contrast, when feedback is given regularly, it tends to be received more positively. Employees view it as less threatening and more helpful. Over time, frequent reinforcement and recognition lead to greater engagement and performance. As CEO of my company for nearly two decades, I can attest: It feels good to give positive feedback. Over time, it creates a virtuous cycle: You start looking for moments to commend employee performance just as much as you look for ways to help them improve. The early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, September 5, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aytekin Tank is the founder and CEO of Jotform and the author of Automate Your Busywork. Tank is a renowned industry leader on topics such as entrepreneurship, technology, bootstrapping, and productivity More
Forbes
24-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Sensemaking: A Leadership Superpower That Creates Hope In Uncertainty
Will you face uncertainty alone with prefabricated answers, or together with the superpower of ... More collective sensemaking. Which leader will you choose to be? You're three minutes into an all-hands meeting when someone asks the question you've been expecting, "What does AI transformation really mean for our jobs?" The room goes quiet. Twenty pairs of eyes turn to you. They know you don't have the information they seek, yet they're still searching for something. Your instinct is to provide reassurance, share the implementation timeline and outline the training programs. But what if that's exactly the wrong response? Gallup research reveals that employees need hope more than anything else from their leaders— accounting for 56% of all positive leadership attributes and far exceeding trust (33%), compassion (7%), and stability (4%). But hope that comes from false certainty or sugar-coated predictions is fleeting and does more harm in the end. Hope that endures is created when leaders help people to make sense of complexity, find meaning in change, and discover their own capacity to navigate uncertainty. The Answer Trap: Why Traditional Leadership Is Failing Join any leadership meeting today, and you'll witness a familiar pattern: problems are presented, solutions are discussed, and decisions are made. It's a ritual that suggests control and competence. But as the author Jennifer Garvey Berger observes in her groundbreaking work on leadership, "The most effective leaders are no longer the ones with the best answers, but the ones who host the best conversations." This isn't just about communication style. It's about recognizing that we've moved from the Information Age to what we might call the Interpretation Age. Information is ubiquitous; making sense of it is a scarce resource. Organizational psychologist Karl Weick demonstrated through his pioneering research on sensemaking in the 1960s that humans don't simply process information; they actively construct meaning from ambiguous cues, and the sensemaking process is fundamentally social. Sensemaking isn't a one-way street from leader to follower. The Bidirectional Nature of Sensemaking As Berger says, "Other people are likely to be making sense of the world differently from ourselves, and their different sense of the world can help us build a bigger picture of the situation before we make decisions." Rather than attempting to distill and dispense meaning in complexity, leaders should actively seek and surface diverse perspectives within their organizations. Weick believed that the best defense against complexity is not simplicity but organized complexity—varied, diverse, partially connected responses that enable learning and adaptation. A single leader's perspective, no matter how brilliant, cannot match the interpretive richness of a diverse team. When that employee asks about AI's impact on jobs, they're not just seeking information; they're also offering their perspective, concerns and their reading of the situation. Traditional leaders miss this gold mine of insight by rushing to provide answers. Sensemaking leaders recognize the question itself as valuable data about how the organization is interpreting change and use it as an opportunity to gather more perspectives from the team. Building Your Sensemaking Toolkit: Three Transformative Practices Sensemaking is a learnable skill that can transform how leaders help their teams navigate uncertainty: Instead of rushing to provide answers, master the art of asking questions that generate new understanding. In Practice: When a team member comes to you with a problem, resist the urge to solve it. Instead, try: Move from information transfer to meaning creation. This involves creating structured conversations that allow multiple perspectives to surface and interact. In Practice: Replace traditional update meetings with sensemaking sessions: Help teams see situations through multiple lenses, expanding their repertoire of responses. This involves consciously shifting between different frames of reference. In Practice: When facing a challenge, explore different frames: From Sense-Giver to Sense-Maker: Your Leadership Evolution The shift from answer-giving to sensemaking is a fundamental evolution in leadership identity. It requires what Robert Kegan calls a "subject-object shift": moving from being the subject who has answers to being someone who can observe and facilitate the process of answer-finding. Your next meeting, your next crisis, your next "I don't know" moment—each is an opportunity to practice sensemaking rather than answer-giving. In a world where change is the only constant, the leaders who thrive won't be those with the most answers, but those with the best processes for finding them. The question isn't whether you'll face uncertainty—we all are, right now. The question is whether you'll face it alone with prefabricated answers, or together with the superpower of collective sensemaking. Which leader will you choose to be?
The Australian
16-07-2025
- Business
- The Australian
Performance across six-step framework is a must for the best
The Australian Best Places to Work 2025 is produced in partnership with the leading employee-experience platform WorkL, which helps organisations to measure, track and improve employee experience with surveys. The Australian Best Places to Work survey uses 35 questions from WorkL's employee engagement survey, developed by behavioural scientists, data analysts, psychologists, business leaders, academics and other independent parties to most accurately monitor employee engagement and wellbeing in the workplace. To achieve a high overall engagement score, an organisation must consistently perform well across WorkL's six-step framework, encompassing: 1. Reward and Recognition 2. Instilling Pride 3. Information Sharing 4. Empowerment 5. Wellbeing 6. Job Satisfaction It is not possible to trade off one dimension against another. In a highly engaged workplace, all six steps will be seen positively by employees, albeit to varying degrees. Each of WorkL's Six Steps consists of between three and five key elements, which are measured on a 0-10 scale. An organisation's overall engagement score is the sum of all question responses, divided by the maximum possible value as a percentage. This Australian Best Places to Work survey asks employees to respond to statements including: • I am happy with the hours I work • I am fairly paid • I am recognised when I do something well • I do something worthwhile • I feel proud to work for my organisation • Information is freely and openly shared with me • I have enough information to do my job well • My views are heard at work • I understand the organisation's plan • I am trusted by management and my colleagues to make decisions • I have the tools and training to do my job well • My organisation cares for my wellbeing • I don't often feel anxious or depressed about work • I feel happy at work • I am treated with respect • I have a good relationship with my manager • I am developing in my role • I work in a well-run organisation To be successfully accredited as an Australian Best Place to Work, organisations must achieve a minimum 70 per cent overall engagement score. Our banding threshold is based on both independent and WorkL commissioned research on employee engagement initiatives and is reinforced by WorkL's benchmarking data of more than 115,000 organisations. For an accurate representation of employee sentiment, organisations were required to send the survey to as many current employees as possible. For The Australian Best Places to Work 2025 listings online visit www. To enter the awards for next year, go to
