Sharing kudos or positive feedback with other employees has a very positive impact on others but it can have several personal benefits for you as well.
Enhances Your Leadership and Influence
When you regularly share positive feedback, you naturally position yourself as a leader, regardless of your formal title. By recognizing and uplifting others, you build a reputation as someone who is supportive, fair, and motivating. This can increase your influence within the organization, as people are more likely to respect and follow those who acknowledge and appreciate their contributions.
Improves Your Relationships and Networking
Acknowledging others' efforts helps build stronger relationships with your colleagues. Positive interactions foster goodwill, making your coworkers more inclined to collaborate with you and support you when needed. This can be particularly beneficial when working on team projects or when you need assistance or cooperation from others.
Boosts Your Own Job Satisfaction and Happiness
Sharing kudos not only makes others feel good but also enhances your own sense of fulfillment. Acts of kindness and recognition trigger positive emotions and can contribute to a more positive mindset. By focusing on the strengths and achievements of your colleagues, you cultivate a more optimistic outlook, which can lead to greater personal satisfaction and a more enjoyable work experience.
These benefits can enhance your career development, improve your work relationships, and contribute to a more positive and productive work environment. However, are you currently sharing enough positive feedback with your colleagues?
The Losada Ratio
Marcial Francisco Losada is a Chilean psychologist, former director of the Center for Advanced Research (CFAR) at the University of Ann Arbor, USA. He developed the idea that there is an ideal ratio between positive and negative sentences exchanged between two people so that the relationship between these two people goes well.
Initially, this concept was developed in the context of corporate workspaces.
Martial Losada studied the comments made during meetings, coding them as positive and negative, in sixty companies. Then, the researcher calculated the ratio between positive and negative comments, linking them to performance.
He found the following results:
– High-performing teams have a ratio of 6 positive interactions for 1 negative interaction (ratio 6/1);
– Poorly performing teams have a ratio of 2 positive interactions for 1 negative interaction (ratio 2/1);
– Underperforming teams have a ratio of 1 positive interaction for 3 negative interactions (ratio 1/3).
The research’s conclusion: teams that have mostly positive exchanges have better performance.
This seems like common sense, but Martial Losada wanted to go further, by looking for the critical threshold below which one should not go. He defined the critical threshold of performance in business at 2.9 positive feedback for 1 negative feedback.
They also consider that ratios between 2.9 and 11.6 constitute the zone in which teams display the best performance. On the other hand, a ratio that is too positive (13 positive words or more for 1 negative word) guarantees perfect inefficiency.
Intuitively, we can imagine that a good balance between positive and negative feedback allows for more harmonious and constructive relationships between team members.
Even if one can dispute the mathematical aspect of the Losada ratio - it is very difficult to model human relationships by transforming them into pure mathematics - it seems common sense that a more positive than critical attitude in human relationships generates better results than an essentially critical attitude.
This observation is unfortunately not always shared, and we all know how many people - especially in some companies - permanently adopt a critical attitude towards their colleagues as if it were proof of their intelligence...
In addition, having a concrete ratio allows everyone to have a benchmark and to realize how necessary it is to share positive feedback so that constructive or negative feedback is well received and does not deteriorate their work relationships.
In companies equipped with a continuous feedback platform such as Popwork, employees can easily visualize the ratio of positive feedback that they share. At the HR level, this also allows one to see at the company or department level whether the Losada ratio is respected.
This is one way to measure your company’s feedback culture and encourage employees to share positive feedback with each other!
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