Strengths-based Feedback Yields Benefits

At MAPFRE Insurance, a global research insurance group with more than 36,000 employees, supervisors have flipped the script: Instead of using performance management to home in on employee flaws and correct them with managers, supervisors focus their efforts on rewarding what employees are doing right.

“We spend very little time on what they need to improve on,” Jeremy McKechnie, manager of ECC Workforce Management with MAPFRE, told Diginomica. “What we've found is when we focus on the good things people are doing, and kind of recognizing that and giving it a pat on the back, a lot off the staff are self-correcting the stuff that we would bring up.”

In doing so, MAPFRE is leveraging an approach backed up by numerous studies. One study by Gartner found that when companies focus on employee strengths during performance reviews, employee performance rises by up to 36%; a focus on weakness, on the other hand, decreased performance by 27%. Later research by Gallup discovered that managers who receive strengths-based feedback improve their productivity by 12.5% while improving company profitability by 8.9%. 

How does positive feedback lead to greater results and engagement? Scientists have concluded that focusing on people’s shortcomings or gaps doesn’t enable learning; rather, it impairs it.

“Feedback is about telling people what we think of their performance and how they should do it better—whether they’re giving an effective presentation, leading a team, or creating a strategy. And on that, the research is clear: Telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning,” Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall wrote in Harvard Business Review.

People who work from their strengths at work, as opposed to focusing on improving their weaknesses, are happier, less stressed, more creative and more engaged at work, according to Psychology Today. A strengths-based approach improves team performance and success, studies have concluded.          

At MAPFRE, which lives by its slogan, “People who take care of people,” managers found that focusing on employees’ strengths rather than weaknesses had similar benefits.  The company rolled out NICE Performance Management in early 2019.

“[Employees] want to do better,” McKechnie said. “They're more engaged. We've seen our good-place-to-work scores, all that kind of stuff, improve as we've focused more on, ‘Hey, you did a great job,’ versus, ‘Here's how you can do a better job.’”

“Now all of a sudden, people are more excited about coaching. They look forward to that, because it is a very different experience than it was.”

To learn more on how you can benefit from your employees’ strengths visit our NPM webpage .