Innovative Management Concepts, Inc.
21400 Ridgetop Circle, Suite 210
Dulles, VA 20166

Overview
Continuous Feedback System^® (CFS^®) provides an innovative approach to revolutionizing communication patterns within your organization.  By removing communication barriers, CFS allows feedback and other informal inputs to flow quickly between organization members and decision makers at all levels.  Through CFS, your organization can receive continuous feedback on any aspect of your organization. 

 By simply accessing the CFS Website, members of your organization and customers will be able to voice their opinions on topics and issues that are important to them and to management.  CFS's systematic approach to receiving and analyzing user feedback allows users to respond to two to six statements on any aspect of your organization in less than a minute.  The process can be repeated for as many topics the respondent wishes to provide feedback on.  Leaders and managers using CFS can in turn analyze thousands of responses in five to ten minutes and gain significant insights on how their employees or customers perceive your organization's performance on specific topics and issues.

What Makes CFS Unique and Much Better than Standard Employee Surveys?
  §    CFS lets respondents provide feedback whenever they wish; there is no survey "timetable," with large gaps between surveys.

  § CFS lets respondents pick the topics they wish to provide feedback on; there is no "canned" set of topics and issues that all respondents must provide feedback on.

  §      CFS is instantaneous; there is no lag time between when feedback is captured and when it is available for decision maker evaluation and analysis.

  §       CFS automatically provides trend data; it is easy for leaders and managers to detect when changes in employee perceptions are occurring - both positive and negative.

  §       CFS allows leaders and managers to gather timely feedback on critical topics and issues without having to ask employees to fill out "another" survey.

  §         CFS allows workers to see their peer's perceptions on topics and issues that are of interest to them.

Who uses it?
 Your organization can choose who will be part of CFS.  CFS users can include supervisors, employees, customers, and members of any community that is impacted by, or in some way related to your organization.

 When users first log into CFS, they will be asked a set of questions to determine their user profile.  CFS users can act as respondents (i.e., they provide feedback) and/or evaluators (i.e., they view summary statistics on feedback). User profiles are used as a filter which only allows users to provide feedback and evaluate summary statistics on feedback on areas that are relevant to their work and experiences. 

 As a respondent, a user provides feedback through CFS by responding to queries.  As an evaluator, a user evaluates feedback by reviewing the results and the graphical analysis provided by CFS.  All users can be respondents for the areas that match their user profile.  In addition, users can also be evaluators for as many areas as leadership desires.  This latter capability opens lines of communication among peers at the working level, and has the potential to foster "grass roots" initiated improvements.   

How does it work?
CFS consists of a database that stores queries for a particular organization.  These queries are classified into topics and issues.  The following paragraphs provide a description of topics, issues, and queries.

Topics consist of broad areas within the organization that are related to different business processes.  When respondents want to voice their opinions, they will have the option of selecting one or more topics from the list that appears on the screen.  The list of topics displayed to each respondent is based on his or her user profile.

Issues are specific aspects of a topic and they are used in two ways.  First, issues are used to assist in organizing query statements for each topic.  Second, issues are used to help evaluators analyze the data collected by CFS.  Some examples of issues are teamwork, morale, stress, and quality. 

Data can be analyzed on four different levels: by topic, by issue, by respondent category (based on user profile), and by specific query statement.

Queries are statements that are presented to users about certain topics and issues.  For each query statement, respondents indicate their level of agreement with the statement by indicating that they strongly disagree, disagree, mildly disagree, are neutral, mildly agree, agree, or strongly agree (a seven-point Likert scale). 

The diagram below illustrates the relationship between topics, issues, and queries for a sample project or program.  Of course, in the case where CFS is used for an entire organization, the topics on this project would be just a subset of the overall topics for the organization.

Customizing CFS
The quality of topics, issues, queries, and respondent types in your organization's database are critical to the success of CFS.  To speed up the process, IMC has developed a list of generic topics, issues, and respondent types to serve as a guide in creating the set that will be used for your organization.  IMC will need to work with members of your organization to come up with the topics, issues, and respondent types that are a good fit for your organization.  Changes can be made to the topics, issues, and respondent types as changes occur in your organization. Once identified, these changes take only minutes to implement.

Continuous Feedback System (CFS) - What's It All About?

Ø It's About Communication

All organizations have communication challenges.  Workers have trouble talking to their supervisor when they perceive a problem or want to make suggestions.   First level supervisors have trouble deciding what information should be passed on to upper management - and they most often err on the side of saying too little or nothing at all.  Customers have no way to provide a continuous stream of feedback on services and products - in most cases occasional surveys are too narrowly focused and insufficient.  The larger the organization the harder it is to solve these problems.  Many organizations don't even try.  The Continuous Feedback System (CFS) is an innovative, cost effective way to remove these barriers to communication.

ØIt's About Identifying What Might be Wrong in Your Organization

Employees and customers often feel that they know what is wrong in an organization - their perception is often accurate.  Unfortunately, they seldom have an efficient and effective way to make their perception known - and when they do it is often ignored.  Managers are reluctant to pass on negative input from their subordinates for fear it will be inaccurate or it will reflect badly on them.  Ironically, these informal communications have been shown to be a major success factor in small, close-knit organizations and projects.  CFS provides the mechanism for gathering and evaluating employee inputs on "What Might be Wrong." 

Ø It's About Real Time Process Improvement

Once managers and leaders know what is wrong they need to make changes.  When standard process improvement or business reengineering methods are used there is a lag between the when a broken process is identified and when actual process changes are made.  This time lag can be six months or longer.  CFS allows supervisors, managers and leaders to instantly see what people perceive to be wrong and also what seems to be going right.  They can react immediately - learning more about what might be wrong and making small changes while they are negotiating with upper management on bigger changes. 

Ø It's About Improving Morale and Reducing Turnover

Low employee morale is expensive.  When morale is low people are not as productive as they can be - and they often leave.  The cost of people leaving and the cost of hiring replacements are high.  CFS is a mechanism that allows people to be heard, which research has shown is a key ingredient to maintaining high morale.  When people feel they are being listened to, they feel important, and this leads to higher morale and higher productivity.  The savings in recruiting costs alone could pay for CFS, making the rest of the benefits of CFS virtually free. 

ØIt's About Preventive Maintenance versus Damage Control

Leaders and managers need to know today what is happening in their organization today.  Quite often they first hear about issues that surfaced somewhere in the organization months ago and are now a major problem.  If they had known about an issue when it first surfaced, they could have found a simple fix that would have taken little time and very few resources.  Unfortunately, once a problem get too big it takes a lot of time and a major commitment of resources to fix it properly.  Perhaps the most valuable resource that is consumed during damage control is the time leaders and managers must take away from their roles that generate new products, services, and customers.  This opportunity cost is not often considered when preventive measures and methods like CFS are considered but rejected.