Feedback

In the business world we are trained to appreciate the importance of feedback. We need to seek feedback from our customers on our performance and our products and we need to provide feedback to our staff on their performance.

However, we don't always appreciate the importance of feedback away from the office. Young people do, social networking is all about giving and receiving feedback, but baby boomers and seniors have been raised to be more independent and are a lot more reticent when it comes to providing feedback.

There are two situations where I would like to encourage all of you to provide feedback.

Firstly to volunteers. All of our clubs and networks depend on the work of committees of volunteers and these people who work tirelessly at often thankless tasks need your feedback to let them know that they are appreciated, tell them what they are doing right, and to give them a chance to change direction when they are doing something wrong.

Secondly, to electronic systems like web sites and social networks. This is less intuitive than providing feedback to volunteers but it is just as necessary. Systems like Google and Facebook automatically assign priority based on popularity of posts. So while all this clicking on LIKE and adding comments might seem a waste of time; by clicking on LIKE for something you actually like; you are increasing the chances that it will be seen by more people. You are also providing positive feedback to the person posting the information which increases the likelihood that they will post more information that you will like in future.

So when you are asked to comment on a proposal, event, or service spend a couple of minutes telling us what you think so we can improve the services we provide.