The Role of Positive Feedback
Telling your employees that they are doing a good job and then pointing out specific
examples is providing positive feedback. When the executive housekeeper
says to the room attendant, “Great job! This room is perfect. I can see that you
take a lot of pride in your work,” the manager has left the room attendant with
a feeling of pride for a job well done, and the manager has also reinforced the importance
of properly cleaning the hotel’s guest rooms. Such feedback only takes
a moment to deliver, but its effects can last a very long time.
Positive feedback is easy to deliver, so it’s unclear why many managers and
supervisors fail miserably in this area. Employees in some hospitality operations
get so little feedback from management that they begin to wonder whether the
work that they do even matters. These are the employees who quickly get frustrated
and leave the company for greener pastures—not in the sense that they
leave for more money, but that they prefer to work for an organization where
what they do is important to the overall success of the operation, that what they
do matters. Delivering positive feedback usually feels good, both to the deliverer
and to the receiver. Positive feedback is almost always well received because it
reinforces what people want to hear or what they already believe to be true
about themselves.