The biggest lever your business has is your people. But how can you ensure they're firing on all cylinders?
By providing timely feedback across all areas of the business, you can drive performance, boost innovation, and get the most out of your team.
Read on to discover actionable tips for harnessing the power of feedback in your business.
The success of your business hinges on the strength of your team. But to hit their peak, they need to know where, what and how they can get better (and better… and better).
That’s why, as your business scales, a culture of feedback is key.
But this is far from a stuffy annual performance review. ‘Rate yourself out of 5’, ‘rate yourself out of 10’, ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’...
At the pace you’re setting, you need real-time, actionable feedback that’s tailored to the challenges you face. It should help your team improve on a daily basis and encourage them to feed into the direction your business is taking.
There’s different ways of giving feedback. But getting it right can develop your team, alleviate your pressure points, and create a culture of accountability that drives your business forward.
What is a culture of feedback?
A culture of feedback is when each employee, regardless of their position, is encouraged to freely exchange and receive feedback. That could be a manager pointing out where something could be improved, or the most junior member of your team stopping you in the hall with an idea.
It includes how each member of staff can voice their opinions and contribute to your business strategy, how peers offer opinions to one another, and how management provides the right feedback, at the right time to their team.
While it’s natural that feedback is a key part of annual goal setting, performance reviews, and development plans – in a scaling business, it should always be front of mind. This is a culture of feedback, and with a more flexible, more frequent, and more informal approach you can improve the output of your team, make changes at speed, and hit your ambitious targets.
Why is a culture of feedback important?
The ability to offer relevant, useful feedback can be the difference between a successful start-up, and one that falls short.
Here’s how feedback can benefit your business:
Innovation:
By encouraging your team to share their views and opinions, you can unleash their creativity. Through the continuous exchange of feedback, your team becomes dynamic in problem-solving, fostering growth and innovation in your business.
Productivity:
Open, honest feedback builds trust – and with transparent expectations and areas of focus, your team will be able to allocate their time better and sharpen their skills. In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review revealed that regular feedback can improve someone’s productivity by almost 40%.
Performance:
With greater collaboration and widespread knowledge sharing, the performance of your team will undoubtedly improve. This is echoed by employees, with Adobe finding that 7 in 10 people believe their performance would benefit from receiving more frequent feedback.
Talent retention:
Research from Gallup has found that 80% of employees who receive regular, meaningful feedback are highly engaged with their job. This stands to reason, as the best talent likes to grow. Making your workplace somewhere someone is continuously improving not only maximises their potential, but makes them more loyal.
Revenue:
Most importantly, a culture of feedback directly impacts your bottom line. By improving working practices and output, reducing employee turnover, and promoting innovation, your business stands to increase its profitability. According to estimates from Globoforce and SHRM, companies with effective feedback processes record a 15% higher revenue compared to those that don't.
Types of feedback
By embracing and integrating these different types of feedback, you can create an environment that values collaboration, learning, and growth.
Common forms of feedback include:
Top-down feedback:
The most common form, where managers or leaders provide guidance, praise, and direction for improvement to their team members.
Bottom-up feedback:
Involves employees offering feedback to the business, typically regarding market opportunities, strategy, culture, or concerns.
Peer-to-Peer feedback:
Colleagues sharing their views on work or projects that they have completed together, fostering long-term collaboration, mutual learning, and accountability.
360-degree feedback:
Provides a comprehensive view of performance by gathering insights from multiple sources, including managers, peers, direct reports, and customers, highlighting strengths and areas for improvement.
How feedback can be shared
A culture of feedback doesn’t need to be daunting. It doesn’t have to be aggressive, and it doesn’t have to be personal. There are plenty of ways to make it happen, with a bunch of tools that can lend a hand to you or your HR team.
First off, let’s talk about the two main groups of feedback:
- Open feedback is where individuals are transparent with their thoughts and opinions. As it’s offered directly by the person providing the feedback, it’s normally more constructive. Open feedback helps build trust and allows room for a follow-up.
- Anonymous feedback offers a safe space for your team to share their views without fear of judgement or what they’ve said coming back to them. This helps uncover hidden issues around potentially sensitive topics and can offer more honesty than open feedback.
Mixing both open and anonymous feedback means you’re able to overcome minor issues and spot areas of improvement, while still being aware of more serious concerns. In addition, this can increase psychological safety.
Here’s some ideas to get you started:
Weekly 1-on-1 meetings:
Have your managers and each member of their team meet regularly to discuss tasks and projects in real-time, so that constructive feedback and guidance can have an immediate impact.
Quarterly Performance Reviews / development talks:
This is a deeper conversation around someone's performance, meaning you can build solid development plans for your team without waiting for the end of the year.
Skip-level meetings:
This offers junior team members some face time with upper management without the presence of their line manager. It gives them a voice and can help the flow of information and ensure nothing gets lost.
Anonymous polls and surveys:
Use these to gauge employee satisfaction and gather feedback on company culture, policies, strategy, and management performance.
Message boards:
Encourage open communication and the sharing of ideas on platforms like Slack. It fosters community and encourages everyone to get involved. For the best results, make sure someone from leadership engages with each idea shared.
10 tips for creating a culture of feedback
At Foundation Partners, we can offer you the guidance and support you need to build a culture of feedback within your organisation. From embedding a fractional People leader into your organisation, to offering best-in-class leadership coaching, we are on hand to help you get it right at the first attempt.
Our 10 top tips for creating a culture of feedback are:
- Practise what you preach: No offence, but you don’t know everything. No one can! So you should lead by example by regularly asking for feedback from everyone in your company. Being open, approachable, and showing genuine care will help strengthen the culture of feedback in your business.
- Develop your leaders: Empower your management team to provide regular, constructive feedback. Investing in their development enables them to swiftly pinpoint areas for improvement, engage in meaningful conversations, and offer continuous support and guidance to their teams.
- Engage your team: Be upfront about what you’re doing – and why, and provide clear guidance to your team on how to receive and process the feedback they receive. Make it clear that the goal is to support their growth rather than criticise or punish them.
- Offer a safe space: Create an environment where employees feel comfortable not just receiving feedback, but providing it. Offer anonymity if needed and ensure that feedback is listened to and responded to. This fosters a culture where employees feel heard and valued.
- Tailor feedback to each individual: Wherever possible, try to customise your feedback to match the preferences of each person on the team. Take the time to ask them how they prefer to receive feedback and go with that. For instance, some may respond better to a direct approach, while others may benefit from more gentle input.
- Always be constructive: Harsh criticism and vague feedback are unhelpful. Instead, be specific, objective and offer potential solutions. It's best to frame feedback as opportunities for growth rather than highlighting mistakes, which means instead of redoing tasks for them, you should invest time in coaching, guiding, and empowering them to improve.
- Make it actionable: Providing feedback that is very clear as to the expected behaviour or skills required is the best kind of feedback. Feedback is (almost) pointless if it can't be actionable. Even with positive feedback, be specific as to what the person did well so that they are clear and can repeat that. A "this is a great report because it is succinct, straight to the point and uses bullet points to cut through the noise" is much better than "well done, this is a great report.”
- Support their development: Consider how you can help them on their path to success. This could be offering them the chance to undertake training, receive mentorship, attend a workshop, or the opportunity to shadow someone who is more experienced in a specific area of the business.
- Celebrate improvements: If someone has taken feedback on board – shout about it. Recognising their efforts and their improvements will reinforce the culture of feedback you’re looking to create. It makes it all worthwhile and can boost engagement across the board.
- Keep it up: Consistency is key. Ensure that the practices you put in place don’t fall by the wayside. Feedback should be integrated into the day-to-day life of your company, making it second nature for your team to receive and provide feedback.
Final thoughts
To wrap things up, fostering a culture of feedback is key to scaling your company. Put simply, that’s because, by getting the very best out of your team, you’ll be able to get the very best out of your business.
By implementing effective feedback processes early, you can make sure you don’t wait months to course correct and can help your team to develop at the same speed as your business.
Doing so will not only drive innovation, productivity, and performance but ultimately boost your bottom line.
Navigating the next phase of your business journey? At Foundation Partners, we can be your compass.
Get in touch to find out how we can help.