Feedback and Performance at Work

Ultimately, people will stick around if they believe and can see that there are genuine opportunities to grow and develop. They want to feel heard, trusted and empowered in their work. 

All the recent research shows that feedback frequency influences how connected people feel to their work (6). It’s also something that people in distributed and remote work environments want more of, especially from their managers. So let’s start with feedback.

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Feedback 

Frequent, transparent feedback is the cornerstone of building a strong culture. Feedback bonds teams and individuals, playing a significant role in building trust. Without trust, communication breaks down. Building a culture of feedback and transparency starts and ends with the founding team.

Feedback can come in many forms, but if you’re serious about improving as an individual, as a team, and ultimately as a company, you must be curious and seek critical feedback. 

At the end of the day, your people are on the front line, hold important relationships with your customers and ultimately see what’s working or not in your business. The people that work alongside you or report to you see how you best perform. So it’s important that we invest in understanding what’s going well or needs to improve so that we can all grow.

Seeking Feedback

When you seek feedback in your business or your team, there are a few things you can do to ensure that it’s worthwhile for everyone:

‍Just Ask: You can ask for feedback in person during team meetings, 1:1s or through an anonymous survey tool like Frankli. Before you do, ensure your team understands that giving negative feedback will not have any negative repercussions but be appreciated. 

Build a culture of feedback in your meeting by leaving adequate time at the end of team meetings to ask for feedback on the company. For example, in a 1:1 setting, ensure a dedicated talking point is focused on sharing two-way feedback.

You might also want to seek 360 review feedback on a teammate's performance that involves multiple stakeholders across the business and external stakeholders. Again be clear about your expectations and ask. It's also worth considering how best to capture feedback in a timely manner, accurately and securely, with minimum effort and without the need for follow-up.

Acknowledging it: When you get feedback, it’s important to let the person know you understand. A simple but effective way to do this is to replay what you just heard. This ensures that there’s common ground and clarity. It shows you’ve listened, and replaying their words builds trust between you.

Clarify position: When feedback you requested is shared with you, be sure to acknowledge whether you accept the feedback as you understand it or not. If you don’t, be clear about why you don’t accept it. Maybe you need more detail or completely disagree with a perspective shared. Either way, be clear in your communications and avoid getting emotive.

Action: Always treat feedback as a loop and not a line. From my experience, a lack of action or follow-through on feedback received is a common problem. Teams and leadership can spend weeks, even months, pouring over the detail. But guess what? Your people want action.

Review the feedback, and agree on a plan. Set milestones and create a sense of urgency and action. Communicate this with everyone promptly and publish your findings. Closing the loop on the feedback you asked for will go down well with your people. It will also boost future participation when further feedback is sought.

Giving Feedback

If you were to ask founders or people managers in many organisations today, they would likely get a textbook response about how good they are at giving regular feedback to their people. This tends to be heavily weighted toward positive feedback. This certainly has a place, but we must always remember to strike a balance between positive and constructive feedback.

Let’s look at the difference between the two:

‍Praise and recognition: This should be context-driven and delivered in the flow of work when it matters most. It should be timely, relevant and shared publicly. Where there’s an opportunity, always try and link the feedback to values within your business or tie the contribution directly to your company’s mission.

Constructive feedback: Constructive feedback is what helps people grow. We often shy away from delivering constructive feedback because we don’t know where to start. Where we praise publicly, careful consideration should always be given to delivering constructive feedback privately. 

Investing in managers' ability to deliver constructive feedback is worth its weight in gold, as the impact across the business can be huge. Consider starting with investing in a common framework for consistently delivering feedback across your business. The Situation-Behaviour-Impact model (7) and Radical Candor (8) are two of our favourites. 

Upward feedback: Manager effectiveness is one of the key contributors to individual and team success. It’s also a major reason people move on from a company. Introducing upward feedback ensures managers get regular, actionable feedback from the people they manage. As your company grows, this is a valuable step to fold into how you run performance appraisals.

Getting this area right from the outset is critical. If you don’t invest in proactively collecting and giving regular feedback, you’ll quickly find the following problems emerge:

• Your best people will leave: A players have no patience for defensiveness and inconsistent leadership that lacks empathy. If you’re not willing to listen to your people, face your problems and work on fixing them, your people will vote with their feet.
• There’ll be a lack of employee development: If you're not willing to invest in critical feedback that helps your people realise their blind spots and realise their potential, your people will be stagnant. Worse again, people you promote to lead others will never develop the critical skills they need to be effective at scale.
• Operations will stall: Communication breaks down when people cannot share things openly. When communication breaks down, operational inefficiencies creep in. This problem worsens as your company grows, and it becomes even harder to change that culture as time goes on.
• You’ll be in the dark about your company's problems: If you ignore or act defensively every time your team brings up an issue, they’ll soon stop bringing that valuable information to you. This goes back to our earlier point -your people are your eyes and ears on the front line of your business. Choose not to listen or act, and problems will soon present themselves.

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Shifting from Managing Performance to Developing People

Let’s think about the employees we’re hoping to attract and retain.

Most of them live in a digital-first world of on-demand delivery, instant gratification and feedback through social media with real-time access to followers, connections and communities. 

Waiting 365 days to sit down and discuss their performance in an annual review seems entirely out of touch.

So how do we kick-start that evolution?

Performance Development

Rather than thinking about performance reviews as this once-a-year transaction where we review the year that was, make it a more regular conversation and more future-focused on employee growth and development, while reinforcing the impact and behaviours of the individual.

Performance as a Team Sport

More and more forward-thinking companies are starting to look at performance at a team level. It makes sense, right? Most people work collaboratively, and teams deliver most work. The days of solo runs and siloed individual performance are vanishing, replaced by a focus on how team performance drives the organisation forward. 

Of course, it’s still important to look at individual performance contribution or lack thereof, but always in the context of the wider team and organisation. OKRs, as covered in the previous section, are a great way to create alignment, transparency and accountability across teams. 

Continuous Learning and Growth

Compelling careers are critical for retention. If you’re growing quickly or have plans to do so, investing in clear career pathways is a must. It’s a top reason why people leave and one of the main reasons a company's growth slows. 

We should focus on supporting people to realise their potential, to visualise where they can take their career and allow them to take ownership of their own career opportunities. A professional career is no longer linear; it’s likely a diverse mix of experiences and learnings with many potential routes to a desired next role. 

Designing career pathways is one area of focus, but making time for regular conversations focused exclusively on careers should also feature. As managers, think about having a dedicated, purposeful 1:1 meeting focused exclusively on career goals. Do them every quarter.

Managing Remote Performance

We completed the greatest global remote work experiment of our time during the Covid-19 pandemic, which significantly impacted how we think about performance. Instead of measuring inputs and focusing on people showing up in the office, we shifted to a meaningful driver for measuring performance - outcomes. 

Transparency and clarity are the foundations for effective performance in remote teams. It’s up to leadership to ensure expectations are well communicated, documented and understood. Writing down goals, checking in on progress and holding people accountable is a critical to any leader or manager's success. 

Work is no longer a place - let’s embrace that but not at the cost of delivering consistent, high-quality outcomes at a company, team and individual level.

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Action Points:

Immediate Action Points: 

• Evaluate your current feedback processes. Run a survey or use 1:1 meetings to gain employee insights. 

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30-Day Action Points:

• Consider digitising feedback for your teams. A specially-designed tool like Frankli provides a channel for exchanging and requesting feedback and integrates feedback with 1:1 meeting and review tools. 
• Research feedback frameworks that might work for your team. 
• Evaluate your current approach to career development - is it time for an official program?

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90-Day Action Points:

• Use the frameworks mentioned above as the basis for written guidelines on how feedback should be used across your teams. 
• Share written feedback guidelines with your managers.
• Start researching your company’s career development program. Frankli’s Careers tool is a great place to start.

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