Feedback Culture

Overview

A workplace where everyone feels empowered to be honest with anyone, regardless of hierarchy, is one with a healthy culture where turnover tends to be lower and engagement is stronger. Encouraging and fostering frequent feedback has the benefits of improving morale, increasing trust and often improves individual and team performance.

Introduction

We all value feedback to know if we’re doing a good job and to understand how we can improve. Most people get feedback around the time of their regular performance reviews, but this often isn’t regular enough to have a real impact and the last thing you want is a massive surprise during your meeting with your manager. A feedback culture is one where frequent, timely feedback is given at all levels to help everyone continuously improve, learn and grow in their role.

What’s a feedback culture?

It sounds simple - for everyone at your company to be open and honest with everyone else. In reality, this is often much harder to achieve, with hierarchies (both perceived and legitimate) getting in the way of people feeling like they can tell others the truth, as well as workplace friendships meaning telling someone you’ve found something frustrating can be more difficult.

Developing a culture of frequent feedback takes a long time to grow and if it’s something new to you or the company you work for, it will at first seem like a strange idea that takes some experience to understand and get over any initial awkwardness.

Frequent feedback helps:

improve morale - getting more regular positive feedback makes people feel good and rewarded for the work they’re doing which they may only hear at a review
increase trust - if you know people will be honest when you get things wrong, you won’t be concerned about their perception of you, because you’ll know
stop “business speak” - corporate communication just isn’t transparent or open, which is exactly what is encouraged in a feedback culture

Frequent feedback is not:

constant attacks on people or their personalities
nitpicking every small issue that comes up
just about giving developmental feedback

So how do you have a feedback culture?

The first thing to kick things off, or to help new employees to a company with an established feedback culture is some training - so workshops, articles and resources to support people in making it part of their normal work and expectations.

The next thing is to make it normal. This is harder to do, but leading by example and promoting peer-to-peer feedback starts this happening. Sometimes starting with a form asking for feedback after a specific meeting or experience kick-starts more frequent feedback between people but in other teams this comes across as too formal so you need to decide what will work for you. The same goes for how that feedback is delivered - making sure to understand who likes having a face to face chat over a cup of coffee vs who prefers getting a quick email message to give it time to digest will be important.

It’s really important to create an open and honest atmosphere at work so that people feel comfortable both giving and receiving feedback. There shouldn’t be any worries of being told off or held back from projects as a result of giving feedback to a senior stakeholder, nor of the possibility of having a bad reaction to some feedback that’s given.

We said above the importance of receiving feedback; this is vital to the success of a feedback culture. If you or others don’t react well to feedback you’re given, people will be reluctant to be honest and could worry about others reacting in the same way so part of your training will need to be receiving feedback as much as giving it.

Feedback is often initially viewed as a negative thing, but when we talk about a continuous feedback culture, this isn’t just focused on developmental comments. It’s also focused on telling people when they do well, demonstrate company values or go above and beyond in their role so it’s really important to put as much dedication into giving positive feedback as well.

Summary

Defining what your specific feedback culture should be is tough as it will depend on the kind of organisation you work in, the support and buy-in you have from leadership in creating this culture and your starting point. All we can recommend is working out why you want this culture and then understanding how you get there. Usually, slowly and with great patience, and a lot of feedback.

Further Resources

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