If you’ve ever used a grocery store self-checkout machine, you’ve likely learned an important lesson in effective feedback. Feedback is an important part of improving employee performance. But if you’re doing it wrong, you may not get the results you want.
While traveling I met the self-checkout machine at a popular grocery store. While I was new to this machine, I’m pretty confident with the technology. It turns out, I was wrong.
The machine had a very strict monitoring of the scanning and bagging process. For instance, if you even lightly adjusted your bag, between scanning items, the machine would freeze up and you’d get a scolding message.
While I appreciate anti-shoplifting tactics, scanning a few items became an exercise in frustration. You can learn some good lessons from self-checkout machines that can improve your employee feedback process.
What’s the Message?
The self-checkout machine was good at telling me when I was doing something wrong. But it never offered suggestions for how not make the same perceived mistake. As a result, I kept making the same mistake until I could figure out the right way.
In your business, are you telling people only what they’re doing wrong, without proving a path to improvement? This step does take longer but prevents repeated mistakes.
What’s Your Self-Checkout Tone?
For a machine, the self-check machine reminded me of a grumpy school teacher. It seemed to be scolding me if there was a mistake or acted bossy with other tasks.
This was a surprise as the grocery store is well known for having friendly and helpful employees. Obviously, the people who designed the voice software may not have understood the company culture.
In your world, think about how you deliver feedback. Is it constructive or designed to embarrass the other person? You can have the right message delivered with the wrong tone.
Easy to Get Help
If you’re going to have grocery machines that are turned to level 10 on fussiness, then you need to have staff nearby to fix problems and provide assistance. If it becomes too much of a pain to use the machines, and they are the only option for paying, then you may stop going to that store. Availability of assistance matters.
As part of your feedback process, do employees have easy ways to get help or find resources that can answer questions? Sometimes this applies to infrequent but important processes.
A good way to figure out if you need a more robust system is to see if the same questions keep coming up. That’s a sign that improvement is needed.
You’ll get bonus points if you make sure that people know where the answers are kept and they are easy to find.
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