When I was at Deloitte, and a Partner fixed you with his beady eye and barked ‘Feedback – offline!’ your knees started to knock. I gather the culture at Apple was similar, if more public, and someone I know at Tesco once had his report torn in two by Sir Terry at a board meeting and was told ‘there’s your feedback’. This Apprentice-style approach seems only to be on the rise. A recent study of contract workers reports that fewer than 7% of them would consider returning to traditional employment, and I suspect this insidious ‘feedback’ culture is partly to blame. But why does feedback have to be such a negative experience? Read More
In the US, Walmart famously has the Walmart Cheer to galvanise the workers. In the UK, Tesco has the 4 o’clock rumble, where staff down tools and take to the aisles, pulling forward produce from the back of the racks for the next wave of shoppers. As in poker, these cultural ‘tells’ often say more about a company’s values than can the most carefully crafted piece of webpage PR. Read More
