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Last Word | Catalyst
Alexander Mann Solutions
acquires Karen HR
Alexander Mann Solutions
has acquired HR technology
company Karen HR Inc. in
Canada, to accelerate the launch
of new digital products.
Karen HR’s digital ‘cognitive
recruiting assistant’, Karen AI,
takes care of inbound employee
enquiries, providing answers
to common HR-related queries
for an enterprise’s workforce.
It integrates with existing
applicant-tracking systems and
harnesses leading-edge technology
to enhance recruitment processes,
ranking hundreds of CVs per
second. The platform’s shortlisting
and conversion capability allows
recruiters to gain deep insight into
a candidate’s personality.
Memorable feedback:
Look forward? Or back?
Directive feedback – a
response with a future
orientation – is widely
thought to be more effective
than traditional forms of
feedback. It is assumed that
recipients would rather
know how they could
improve in future, than
focus on previous projects
or outputs.
Exploring this, in a
recent study published in
1
The Journal of Experimental
Psychology, researchers
fed back on short essays
written by 61 students.
Half were given directive
comments, while the other
50% were provided with
evaluative (past-orientated)
feedback. All students then
took a memory test on the
comments they received.
Here’s what the researchers
found:
The students were more likely to remember
evaluative feedback. Across six experiments,
participants were found to be 46% more likely to recall past-
orientated feedback.
2
3
Directive feedback was remembered as evaluative.
Students would often relay the forward-looking
responses as criticisms of their previous work.
Evaluative feedback was more memorable even
when it was considered less important. Subjects
were as likely to remember past-orientated comments on
another person’s work as directive comments on their own.
alexandermannsolutions.com
70
Leave it to the boss?
It can be dispiriting when employees fail to gain their full
annual bonuses due to decisions taken by people who don’t
know them personally. New research by the Rotterdam School
of Management suggests that when formal procedures are
replaced by a direct manager’s discretion, workers are far
more likely to be happy with their rewards, and are also
motivated to perform better.
The study focused on bonuses given to workers in a UK-
based government-funded organisation. The results showed
that employees who received a higher bonus perceived their
manager’s judgement to be fairer, and this increased their
motivation. The opposite was also true, as those receiving
a small bonus considered their direct superior’s judgement
to be unfair.
Commenting on the findings, Rebecca Hewett, one of
the report's authors, said: “Several Fortune-500 companies
have reported making a shift towards managers’ using their
discretion when allocating staff bonuses in recent years,
because organisations are increasingly interested in creating
work environments to encourage passion, purpose and
engagement. These factors are about engendering intrinsic
motivation – doing a job because it aligns with who you are
and your core interests and values, rather than pursuing
work-related tasks for extrinsic reasons.”