by Fabio Garganego
When you want to implement a new project, a new idea in our organisation or with your team, what do you focus on? Will you focus on ROI, ROE or … on ROF? What does ROF stand for?
How many times do you start or do you finish a meeting asking the team / the audience: How do you feel? Or do you ask yourself the same question? How do I feel?
Recognizing feelings and emotions is important.
“How people feel about their work is the most important determinant of success.”
How can we give the right weight and importance to this statement?
Starting by acknowledging the significance, instead of ignoring or denying feelings, take the initiative to recognise and express emotions. Managers and leaders can start by embracing their feelings and those of their employees and try to use them in a positive way. Often, individuals may not be fully conscious of their emotions, even when those emotions are impacting them. Conveying feelings helps the brain engage with the emotion and facilitates processing. This can be especially beneficial when dealing with negative emotions, as it enables individuals to create some emotional distance between the employee and what they are doing at work (engagement).
What does ROF stand for?
ROF, or Return On Feeling, is an additional approach to measuring success in organisations. While traditional metrics like ROI1 (Return On Investment) and ROE (Return On Expectations) focus on quantifiable aspects of performance, ROF delves into the realm of feeling, emotions and well-being (physical and psychological). It acknowledges that not all aspects of success can be captured by numbers alone. In a world where employee engagement and organisational culture play pivotal roles, understanding how people feel is paramount. ROF helps organisations gauge the impact of feelings, emotions, and collaborative intelligence (CQ) on their goals. It recognizes that measuring these intangibles is crucial for long-term success and adaptability in a rapidly changing environment.
What helps and ensures success?
There are several ways to measure success: numbers, questionnaires, profitability, happiness, turnovers, etc. What we would like to introduce is something that several organisations already do, but maybe not in a structured and organised way. The ratio that we would like to present is the Return On Feeling (ROF). This kind of indicator is connected to organisational well-being, the great resignation that affects some teams and organisations.
ROF helps us to understand “what really contributes to success?” So how do feelings and emotions favour the success of the project or goal we have set for ourselves or for our team.
At the same time ROF helps to prevent the team from deteriorating or fraying. This is not feasible with ROI and ROE.
In organisations, we use the ROI (Return On Investment), which is one of the most common ratios when, for example, we decide to purchase new machinery. This kind of information is relatively simple to obtain, having the three pieces of information available: cost, time needed to produce a piece (i.e. number of pieces produced in a certain time interval) and selling price. This is a simplified model that does not take into account any boundary conditions.
In a slightly more empirical and complex way, we can derive the ROE (Return On Expectation). ROE measures how successfully a perk (free food, pension scheme, extra day off etc.), a training or a coaching programme meets its objectives, typically based on changes in employee motivation and performance after we offer the service or the programme. In other words, we inquire about what is anticipated from an individual, as opposed to a machine, regarding expectations. In this scenario, we attempted to gauge qualitative and quantitative expectations in relation to the incurred costs.
And for people?
When we measure a person’s performance, things get a little more complicated. Thanks to technology and increasingly sophisticated software, it is possible to measure and compare people’s performance at a qualitative and quantitative level. We can see if they get better or worse, but we ignore what they might feel.
Not so many organisations dedicate the necessary time to explore the feelings of employees. Exploring and examining feelings and emotions can help to be predictive. It helps to understand and improve long-term results.
How can our feelings affect the outcome of expectations and investment? How many times as managers or senior management have we asked ourselves the question; “what do our colleagues/employees feel when faced with this new challenge/new target?”
ROF the Return On Feeling
Many of us are accustomed to assessing the success of an operation, an intervention, or a project using metrics like ROI (Return on Investment) and ROE (Return on Expectations). However, we’ve come to understand that ROI alone is often insufficient. Unlike when we purchase for example new machines that produce bottle caps, we can straightforwardly understand the increased output from 2 caps per minute at a cost of X to 10 caps per minute at a cost of Y. When we hire a new employee, it could be more complex to determine whether an investment or change is truly valuable and requires a more comprehensive evaluation.
We collectively acknowledge the existence of phenomena that resist measurement and validation through traditional ROI or ROE metrics. In such instances, ROI and ROE assessments occur retrospectively or too distantly in the future, potentially jeopardising the investment’s outcome. Fortunately, qualitative tools offer alternative means of measurement.
After two decades of experience collaborating with various organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and America, I began to realise the broader spectrum of analysis and measurement opportunities available to teams. This perspective evolved as I transitioned from a managerial role to that of a team coach.
I enjoy drawing this analogy in the context of ROx: ROI can be likened to IQ (Intelligence Quotient), just as ROE can be linked to EQ (Emotional Quotient or Emotional Intelligence). And what about ROF? ROF corresponds to CQ (Collaborative Intelligence). Some interesting references come from the book Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking With People Who Think Differently by Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur.
Let’s try to compare the three ratios:
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These three parameters are certainly supportive for the success of every project and objective.
Here are some interesting questions that could help us to understand and increase the awareness of the ROF ratio.
How much importance do we give to each of the three factors?
How much time do we spend understanding how our colleagues/teams feel?
How can our teams’ feelings and thoughts support the success of our projects?
How can I implement the use of ROF?
Where can we start to explore the ROF?
Have we ever thought about where they are positioned, for example, in relation to Lencioni’s pyramid?
We had the opportunity to see the iceberg metaphor several times, but Where do ROI, ROE and ROF fit into this?. What is interesting is that the ROF is underwater… where we find: feelings, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, values, cognitive distortions and fears. This means that with ROF we can explore this interesting part of the team.
Another interesting reasoning that can help us better understand the importance of ROF is: what similarities do we see or how can we relate the iceberg and Lencioni’s pyramid?
Here is an insightful comparison of the operational levels and interactions among these three indicators. What serves as the foundation for these indicators? Examining Lencioni’s pyramid offers clarity in this context, aiding us in identifying the particular level we should emphasise.
Who can help you to explore the team in depth?
As illustrated in the iceberg diagram, the domain associated with ROF is broad, and coaching, especially team coaching, offers the opportunity to navigate and explore: feelings, emotions, values, beliefs, thoughts and fears. One can initiate this journey from the information, the insights gathered from a questionnaire and further delve into devising actions or embarking on an exploration of the team’s ROF through a team coaching process. There exists a wealth of uncharted territory beneath the surface, which a team coach can assist in uncovering-areas that may not be readily apparent through a mere questionnaire.
Here below is an interesting example of how and where the three indicators intersect with Lencioni’s pyramid. We can see how ROF helps to understand how the team feels. Here are some powerful questions that we can ask the team. A team coach can help you to better support in this exploring process with your team.
- How can we measure psychological safety in the workplace?
- What can we do in parallel or before the implementation of a project?
- How can it anticipate or help to solve conflict?
- How can we understand where to improve the commitment of the team?
- What are the key factors to make the team accountable?
- Where does the energy come from to success?
Below is a table that allows you to simplify and represent how and where these three indicators can be used more effectively in order to understand which dysfunction is taking place, for example by following the structure of Lencioni’s pyramid. This is a simplification useful to facilitate reflective analysis:
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Back to the question: How can we act to prevent the team from deteriorating or fraying?
Some ideas on ROF and how it can be introduced into companies are described below.
How to start to introduce and implement ROF in your organisation?
The idea of thinking about it! It means we have already started! Here is a group of interesting questions that can help to reflect on how to implement ROF.
- Would we approach the journey “alone” or with a team coach?
- What do we want to explore first?
- What would we like to understand?
- What do we want to include in the search?
- How to narrow it down to a specific argument or group of arguments?
How can we use and measure ROF?
It is not easy to measure ROF, but it is possible. With the guidance of a skilled team coach, we can delve into the team’s emotions and feelings in connection to the goal we wish to achieve. As this involves qualitative data, employing a questionnaire can indeed serve to structure the subject matter and bridge the gap between feelings and performance. However, undoubtedly, certain team coaching sessions can play a pivotal role in fostering the project’s outstanding success and attaining the goal.
Here are the actions that can be employed and followed:
- Identify someone in the organisation or outside the organisation that can help you during the process (possibly an expert in team coaching);
- Define objective and areas of interest to explore (feelings) and how this can interact with the goal;
- Prepare and conduct a questionnaire or a chemistry session with the team focused on what we want to investigate and analyse;
- Examine the results (pre-reflective analysis);
- Prepare an ad hoc team coaching programme, based on the pre-reflective analysis;
- Meet the team. Share the results of the analysis and work with the team itself for the success of the project (motivating, removing friction and conflicts, potential biases or personal beliefs, distortions and barriers);
- Promote team’s reflective analysis and for the coach, between sessions;
- Check the impact of the programme (when feasible);
- Complete the team coaching programme;
- Conduct a new questionnaire to monitor interesting changes in the team and individuals;
- Organise a follow up session, with the team and the senior leadership, where we can share the results.
1 ROI is the most commonly used ratio for gauging an investment’s overall profitability. But like we said above, the formula can also be used to measure the potential value of making a smaller business decision, not just to measure the value of investing in a business as a whole. (https://www.business.org)
About the author
Fabio Garganego is a Faculty Member at Kingstown College and a Team Coach and Business Coach with a particular interest in Team coaching and Corporate Wellbeing. He has over 10 years experience in coaching and mentoring teams in different organisations. Fabio is a native of Italy, fluent in French, English. He has been working and living in Ireland since 2015. He has a Master degree in Electronic Engineering and a Master in Organisation, Management and Innovation. He is the co-founder of Pentago, a team coaching company that operates in Ireland, UK and Italy.
