Developing a feedback culture - Part 1: "Why?"

'Good Feedback is one of the most effective management tools for a supervisor'. I learned this in my first training session as a newly appointed team lead a few years ago. It is a pretty bold statement about something that seems so simple. But it made sense to me and I decided to go with it. Now, after several years of learning about, applying and experimenting with feedback, I do not only fully support this claim. In fact, I firmly believe that a culture of open and constructive feedback can be one of the most important contributions to a healthy and productive work environment. Sadly enough, personal observation as well as reports from other engineers tell me that oftentimes feedback is still applied ineffectively, perfunctory or not at all. I think that's a shame, as I have experienced how much good it can do. That’s why I'd like to share my experience with you. Establishing an effective feedback culture requires a considerable amount of time and energy, so be clear with what you want to achieve and why. Here's why I think that this investment will more than pay off in the long run:

Increased individual motivation

Receiving high-quality feedback can be a huge motivator. To be clear, I'm not only talking about positive, appraising feedback. On the contrary: In many cases I've found that it was actually constructive criticism that sparked a colleague's drive to improve. I believe this motivational impact comes from two main aspects: it highlights the relevance of a person and their contribution, strengthening the emotional connection to their work - something that many employees don’t seem to feel, especially in larger companies (1,2). Regular, constructive feedback shows that others actually care about them, their work and their opinions. It shows that what they do matters. That they matter. Secondly, we all enjoy being good and getting better at what we do (3). Showing appreciation for your colleague's qualities and providing concrete suggestions on where they could do better spurns the intrinsic motivation.

More successful teams

In my experience, teams that have established open feedback as part of their working agreements tend to achieve better work results faster. I attribute this partially to the increased motivation I described above. The collaborative forces of the team give that motivation direction and avoid misguided actionism. On the other hand I've noticed that people would ask for their colleagues' opinions on work-related topics much earlier and more frequently. In the ensuing discussions knowledge is shared and the collective brainpower of the whole team is brought to bear. Information silos are avoided to a great extent and the team spirit improves.

Recognizing problems early

Once your colleagues realize that they are respected and listened to, chances are that they will start to talk more openly also about more difficult matters as well. This might take a while and greatly depends on how well criticism is received (more on that in one of the next articles). But once you’re getting there it will make conflicts and potential problems visible much earlier and thus greatly increases the chance to mitigate them with much less effort. This is especially powerful as - in my experience - the vast majority of all problems at work are ultimately the result of bad communication or misunderstandings. People are offended by an email, misinterpret a colleague's actions or feel left out of some discussion that they'd be interested in. Without an open feedback culture, the bad feelings that arise from those incidents are likely to fester and may even result in some form of retribution. If, on the other hand, people are used to talk to each other candidly, many unnecessary conflicts can be solved right away.

You can harvest all of these positive effects already by giving and asking for feedback in a supervisor-employee constellation. It becomes even more of a game-changer however if your colleagues do not hear it from you as their boss but instead give feedback among themselves directly. When everyone knows what everyone else thinks about them, they experience a sense of security on a completely new level. Bad office gossip and mobbing become almost non-existent in such an environment as everyone can address their frustrations openly towards the right person. It also gives everyone in the team a sense of fairer treatment if everyone can criticize everyone else openly. The increase in team-spirit and quality of work can be truly amazing. So, in the long run, the time and effort you invest in feedback will probably yield colleagues who are more motivated and better skilled and thus achieve better work results. They feel more relevant and challenged to grow and tend to become more loyal and attached to their company, so turnover rates and sickness times are likely to decrease. Many problems and interpersonal conflicts can also be addressed much earlier and faster. It is pretty obvious that there's significant potential for saving your company a lot of money and energy here. I'll leave it at this for now. In the next episodes I'll dive more into the topic of how to make feedback as effective as possible and ideas on how to go about building a feedback culture. Thanx for reading, I hope it was worth your time. And obviously (I hope) I'm interested in your feedback about this article.

References:

1. https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/news/meaning-is-more-important-than-money-3913913/
2. https://www.onrec.com/news/news-archive/more-than-half-of-all-uk-employees-are-unhappy-in-the-workplace-according-to-new
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&t=12s

Acknowledgements:

I'm very thankful to Sebastian Thiebes for reviewing this article and giving me a lot of good feedback. I'm also very thankful to Roland Schneider for the training session in which I learned about feedback in the first place.