Digest 36. Digesting the Digests: The road we travelled and the one ahead
Country road photo created by wirestock - freepik
This month marks exactly three years since the launch of the Digests in the REALPAL website and I wish to celebrate this milestone by sharing some reflections.
Few months ago, a woman manager in my network, who is very dedicated to her job, gave me spontaneous feedback on the digests. She said that she appreciates very much the blog and found many useful tips in those posts – something she was indeed actively looking for. It turned out that she had asked the HR department of her organization to prepare a short training on how to communicate feedback, but the outcome had not been what she needed or expected. She disclosed she was hoping for actionable ideas as those found in the REALPAL Digests!
I was (and am) so glad to receive such positive feedback that I want to thank her publicly as her comments made my day. They rewarded me personally (and the rest of the team too) for all our work and confirmed it was worth it. Since our chat, I have thought that by proving useful even just to this one person, the Digests had accomplished their goal. But of course, the more people we can support the merrier we are, and so -I thought to myself- why not sharing some ideas on how these digests could be used by different people with multiple or different needs.
First things first: what are the digests? They are blog posts, which we publish monthly, on the broad topic of feedback and performance management. In each of them, we address a specific issue or practice (e.g., the increasing use of feedback apps) and summarize one or more research studies that have collected empirical data and hence offer scientific evidence on that topic. We conclude with our own practical takeaways on how people could really use or apply those insights.
Now, off to my promised “food for thoughts”.
How could you use the Digests?
If you are an Educator/Professor
If you are, like us, a professor, a lecturer, or a trainer, you may use the Digests by embedding them in your class or coursework pack.
The digests could be a tool for you to refresh some literature and prepare a lecture
The infographics we create for each digest, by highlighting the main findings or features of a study, could be effectively embedded in your slides (I, myself, have tried that and it worked well!)
The digests could be assigned as readings to the students before a class discussion/debate
They could be referred to as resource material for project works (also used – with satisfaction of both myself and my students of an HRM Master course)
If you are a manager or an employee
If you are a manager regularly giving feedback to your collaborators, or if you are an employee regularly receiving and also giving feedback, you may use the Digests for your self-development.
The digests may address questions or doubts you already had from your own experiences. For example: Why is it so hard to give feedback to certain individuals? Is feedback-giving affecting the feedback giver too? How will a creative team react to positive vs. negative feedback? By reading the studies summarized in each digest you will not only find straight answers to those questions, but -most importantly- you will get to know the scientific evidence behind it (i.e., why it seems to work in a certain way and the theoretical reasons behind)
The digests may offer you practical tips ready to apply and try out by yourself (e.g., paying attention to whether you use different feedback formulations for men and women, which may make your feedback “gender-biased”)
If you are an HR person or a consultant
If you are an HR professional/executive or a consultant in the broad HRM field, you may use the Digests to design practices and interventions.
The digests may be a source of practical indications pertaining to the design of appraisal tools (e.g., how many raters to include in 360° evaluations, how to balance numerical and narrative evaluations)
They can also inspire additional reflection and pondering on features that are less commonly considered (e.g., giving team feedback, adjusting the feedback to the type of team or personality of the members)
They could be used in training programs (similarly to what I recommended doing with students)
What is coming next?
May 2022 also marks the formal end date of the project, R.E.A.L. P.A.L., under which the digests were envisioned and created. The research project has kept the team extremely busy with multiple studies, involving the collection of different types of data, in the past three years. While the generous funding from FCT (Portugal) is over, the research itself is not. A long road still awaits us, and we will walk it with the same curiosity and passion that distinguished the first phases of the project ideation and writing. In fact, now it is time to answer our original questions by analyzing our data – and uncover much more than we originally even thought we would focus on.
Just as the research is not “over”, nor are the digests! First, because once engaged in knowledge dissemination, we simply cannot disengage. This has been an inherent goal of the R.E.A.L. P.A.L. project and one that will live beyond it. It is our way of conducting research on the broad topic of performance management and feedback and of contributing to that field – academically and professionally. Second, because our efforts so far have received positive feedback and generated interest in colleagues to collaborate with us.
Hence, the monthly digests will continue, and the team is enlarging! I am delighted to have with us a new contributor – Prof. Alain Klarsfeld, who has been very enthusiastic about the initiative since its early days (check out our new Team page). New energies then, but also new perspectives and new focuses will characterize the next set of digests. The team felt that one element of the performance management process had not yet been addressed in our collection, namely the link of appraisal and feedback with rewards. We will, therefore, channel our efforts in this direction and digest the empirical literature that can offer important inputs on managing rewards – financial and otherwise. Since this “second generation” of digests stems in full continuity with the previous one, we will keep the same structure by summarizing the studies and offering our own reflections on their organizational and managerial implications. Something new has been introduced, however, which is the search tool by category, to be able to locate all blog posts related to any topic of interest. Also, we recommend signing up to the RSS feeds not to miss any posts.
And…stay tuned because much more is being cooked …, while we already think of a “third generation” of digests!
Silvia & the team