A simple framework to transform your team's feedback
Part of our new year “spring cleaning” at Cofruition is to get better at giving feedback throughout the team.
In my career I’ve experienced both heavy- and light-touch approaches to encouraging people to give feedback which became too burdensome, or fizzled out.
This approach seems to find the balance.
Problems we faced
Until now we haven’t been systematic about giving feedback.
Seemingly small things would go unchecked and, by not nipping them in the bud, they’ve proliferated into bigger problems. People would do a good thing, but we didn’t really have the language to articulate why what they’d done was good and so it would often go unspoken.
The root of this was often because “it’s not that big of a deal” - if things are busy, it felt weird to set up a meeting, or speak to someone 1:1 if they had a slightly too long pause on one of the edits (which meant the project manager had to make a quick edit before uploading the episode) or if they reached out to the client if they were missing an audio file from them so that we don’t miss deadlines.
Over time though, these small things compound.
There’s also an aspect of setting expectations within the team. They know broadly that they should “do a good job”, but it shouldn’t be assumed that they know what’s important to us unless we tell them.
This is something we wanted to fix, without being overwhelming.
Approaches we tried
“Create a culture of always giving feedback”
I get the idea - give feedback all. the. time. and others around you will start to do it.
In practice, I’ve found this to fizzle out quite quickly. It rests on the main driver (i.e. me, the CEO) to constantly monitor and implement, and in practice, I’m not in the majority of situations where feedback *should* be begin given.
Recurring agenda items
Having it as a recurring item in our meetings was another idea. In practice, it was never the most important thing for us to talk about, and often a lot of the opportunities for feedback had passed on so weren’t easy to recall.
Having it as part of people’s goals to “give more feedback” was nice in principle, but missed the part of actually doing it.
Automated daily Slack reminders of “Any feedback you should give today?” soon get ignored (we didn’t actually try this).
Where we are (for now at least)
The approach we wanted would:
Here’s where we currently are and steps we've taken:
1. Set work values
We wrote down four values that are important to us in how we want to work. If these begin to drop we no longer delight our clients and colleagues which is the road to going out of business. Bad.
The idea is that these values are all encompassing.
Every action we do in the company should be attributable to one of these values which means that when *anything* is done, we should be able to evaluate it against these criteria.
2. Communicate values and expectations with co-workers
Our approach to giving feedback is now part of onboarding, as well as something we refer to on a regular basis.
We explain that our approach to giving feedback on a regular basis is in line with radical candor. i.e. we give direct, challenging feedback, but it comes from a place of caring.
If people aren’t used to working in a “radical candor environment” I’ve found it’s important to explicitly say that it may feel weird at first.
In many other work environments, “critical feedback” is an indirect way to undermine and belittle the other person. Not at Cofruition though. We have people’s best interests at heart and see giving honest feedback as the best way to help people develop.
3. Create a place to easily store feedback
I wanted a singular depository of all feedback so that we can easily see things over time and not have to search for a specific Google Doc each time we wanted to record feedback.
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We use Airtable as part of our operations and so within there we now have a table called Freelancer Feedback. In this table, each record is a piece of feedback that we can link to a member of the team, and then also one of the four values.
It looks like this:
Myself and the Cofruition core team can add the important things in there for any freelancer in ~30 seconds.
4. Systemise giving feedback
A low-friction repository is only one part of the equation though. How do you get co-workers to add things to it?
As well as making giving feedback part of our culture by talking about it on a regular basis, we’ve identified moments in our work where it would be helpful to get a reminder.
For Cofruition, we have workflows/ checklists for each podcast episode we make for clients.
These typically have 30+ steps that we do each week with our clients to release each episode + create the social content and so we added an additional one for the project manager to do as part of the wrap up tasks.
This makes giving feedback embedded into the workflow that exists already, rather than trying to create a new one, or rely on “I’ll try to remember to do that”.
In terms of the mode of actually giving the feedback, this is not something I want to burden with more process. The Cofruition core team are in regular contact with our other team members and so can decide whether this warrants a quick call, message or standalone meeting.
Removing the friction to giving feedback
One of the slightly hidden benefits of linking each piece of feedback to one of the four values is that gets the feedback giver most of the way there in terms of what they want to say.
No longer is there this uncertainty about whether something is worth saying or big enough of a deal, we can instead say (something to the effect of):
“I saw you had a slightly too long pause on one of the edits (which meant the project manager had to make a quick edit before uploading the episode). This isn’t the excellence we know you are capable of. How can we avoid this happening next time?”
Or
“It was awesome to see that even though you hadn’t received the audio file from the host you nevertheless reached out to them to ask where it was, rather than waiting until it was too late. This is really great proactivity.”
It sounds minor, but there is still friction in trying to figure out why an action was above/ below standard, and attributing it to one of the all-encompassing values removes some friction.
The result is getting a rich flow of communication going throughout the company which ultimately results in identifying opportunities for improvement, and keeping standards high. Good.
5. Quarterly Performance Reviews
Tying this all together is the quarterly performance review.
Until now, we’ve never had a formal process for giving reviews + feedback for team members because it seemed like too much of a faff to do anything beyond the regular catch ups we’d do anyway.
Now, however, we have a system in place where we collect how they’ve performed and can simply filter the Team Feedback table for the name and date range and we have a record of the highs and lows from the past 3 months.
A couple of weeks before the end of the quarter, each team member fills out a tab in a copy of this spreadsheet (feel free to copy it too!) where they say how they think they’ve performed against the four values, and in general. Their line manager does the same.
Doing these “zoomed out” reviews has lots of benefits for the team. With most of the friction gone, we now actually do it: developing the people we work with, and ultimately lifting the standards of work we do for our clients. Excellent.
In summary
Whilst this is what we do at Cofruition at the moment, it will no doubt evolve over time. In any case, if you are also looking for a way to increase the amount of feedback you give within your team then perhaps you could try something similar.
The core principles we’ve tried to stick to are:
Let me know if you have any questions about how we do this, or any ideas you think would be relevant to share!
Awesome to see you be so intentional about this with the business! One of the most valuable cultural assets to cultivate. I'd also add that creating an environment of psychological safety is key to encouraging people to both give and receive feedback more effectively. This is a core component to radical candor that often gets overlooked... Also, providing feedback frameworks like the AID or SBI models can be helpful to structure feedback in an actionable way, which can avoid it becoming just a mechanism for venting!