Leaders Letter 164 - Discover How to Make Company-Wide Feedback Proactive and Effective Now!
Why Company-Wide Feedback & Surveys Are Likely Doing Your Company Performance & Culture A Disservice
Dear leaders, how frequently do you ask for and gather company-wide feedback? My guess is quarterly and it’s often just another task to complete.
As a department lead, you should look for feedback loops as often as possible.
From
One to ones
Skip meetings
Team feedback
Department feedback
QBRs & Quarterly planning with the team
Annual department planning
BAR & AAR (before action reviews and after action reviews)
Your manager's feedback (yes even CEOs have bosses)
One of the hardest things to do as a leader is to make feedback actionable and take steps to improve. For most, you are never given a framework or a tool to keep track of and improve on the essential items of feedback from quarterly check-ins, your annual review and real-time feedback from colleagues.
There is a free feedback model that I like broken down into:
Advice
Compliment
Criticism
Suggestion
This framework helps you list out all feedback and decide if you need to take action or something you should take note of and evolve your approach over time.
Battling Realtime Team & Department Feedback
I bet you have also been in meetings where your team or department becomes under fire and the feedback is mostly lost or unactionable as it’s not recorded or part of a political game from other department leads. This isn’t helping the company, its venting and its hindering progress without formal examples.
Actionable Hint:
Always ask for this feedback in writing and ask for two to three examples of when the team or department have acted like this otherwise it’s likely reactionary to results or not getting the desired outcome.
Create a centralised document and start attacking each piece of feedback (not opinion) and show how you are proactively leading from the front. This makes it clear to the team/department and company how seriously you are taking feedback.
Official tools like Workday struggle with helping department leads to know what to work on and if there are core learning and skills gaps.
This is where there is a big jump (and no bridge) between individual feedback, departmental and company-wide feedback. Very often they are connected and you should learn by sharing knowledge and actions taken.
Company-Wide Feedback
When you’re a company you look for official feedback from all the company employees.
Most ask a series of questions and the answers are anonymous.
Some companies select an eNPS solution and have quant and qual feedback.
There are a few issues that arise:
A low number of responses - requires numerous chases from HR (and becomes disheartening)
Sending a survey to all staff members doesn’t work from an HR perspective. It is not personal to the recipient, it seems low importance and takes a long time versus finishing all of your important tasks. Always being put off.
Hint: Seeding and then nudging from the department lead is a better approach and easier to scale than mass sends from HR or the founderThere is a fundamental lack of trust in the “anonymity” of the surveys (having led software selection the majority are anonymous and aren’t actually sophisticated enough to offer this
eNPS often can confuse the company and without real management and insight it can seem daunting or unrealistic to make any change from a low score to a better score let alone a bigger score
Most who complete the survey don’t trust the answers will be actioned and don’t see the steps (or the discussion) behind the feedback sessions and how it’s handled
Most often these feedback surveys do not highlight the real issues or areas to celebrate in the company culture, it is often performance-based feedback and without more organic and frequent feedback companies will struggle to make a difference for the company or the people.
Google Weekly Move
I recently read that Google has moved from annual feedback to weekly feedback (surveying) and it makes me wonder, why and what is it actually achieving.
Is it a leadership initiative or is it an HR play or a PR response to the ongoing changes and headlines Google are receiving?
I can’t see how this will add value and make any feedback actionable without deep connections and department (Product) to department (Marketing), company (Android) to company (Google Ads).
With thousands of employees at different phases of being unhappy making changes will take a long time and the low-cost low effort will most likely always be selected to roll out.
How to improve weekly feedback? I often suggest a company culture or culture community manager to help to shape and collaborate in company culture - the key is not to be reporting to HR and definitely not to be seen playing the game. Trust is critical.
Other Companies Feedback Cadence
I asked 50 C-suite leaders what their company-wide cadence was and the breakdown was:
Weekly - 2%
Monthly - 44%
Quarterly - 18%
Annually - 36%
When I asked those who replied with monthly as their answer, this changed from annually over the last 18 months, this shows there is either progress or reacting to the demands of hybrid work and forced return to the office.
Feedback is a critical part of management and leadership, that’s obvious, however, what is less obvious is how we review data sources and ask for better feedback loops.
When performance is high you will want to understand the drivers and what and how people are feeling
When performance is down or a big event has taken place and there is a negative sentiment in the air - what can we learn from this
When a core member of the team leaves or when mass layoffs happen what insights and nuggets do we have to garner from the company to improve the business holistically
This week’s focus action is: Ask yourself and the leadership team:
How frequently do you ask for feedback?
How do you show the results and identity which areas you will be working on and the areas of concern you will be taking a longer-term view on?
How do we step up and ask for feedback formally in the good times and then in the low times and how are we proactive in showing we (the leadership team) want to improve the business and not just ask for more?
This won’t improve everything in the near term but in the mid to long term, this approach is going to reshape how feedback is seen, heard and actioned within your business.
Have a great week and if you have feedback for me just hit reply.
Thanks,
Danny Denhard