Hey everyone, welcome back 👋
In today’s post I’ll be writing about creating a culture of consistent quality peer feedback. Building a culture of feedback is not only valuable for the professional growth of engineers it also connects employees back to their work and helps them feel valued for their contributions. This in turn increases their engagement and retention on the team. In many organizations this process is laborious and time intensive but this can be avoided by leveraging the following steps to help improve the process for your team and organization.
First thing you’ll want to do is create a consistent constructive feedback loop throughout the year. Make it frequent enough to provide value and allow enough time between feedback sessions to track progress. Some examples of this could be after each project is completed (if it happens frequently enough for your team) or if you’d like a more scheduled approach, try at the end of every quarter. No matter what method you choose, you want to make sure the approach is taken in a manner that allows reviewers an ability to provide bite sized chunks of feedback at each iteration. Yearly performance reviews are time intensive for all parties and can be sped up by pulling in all data you’ve received throughout the year.
Second thing is to keep these feedback requests straight to the point with 2-4 optional questions and ask for 1-2 points per section. This keeps the required involvement light and allows reviewers the chance to address quick concerns they might have with performance or celebrate recent wins! Make sure to use a simple tool for this as well, in the past I’ve used Google Forms, Polly and various HR platforms at my organizations. The first two are quick and easy to setup but my preference is Polly; if you’re using Slack. You can set up automatic reminders and recurring requests right in the platform. Of course every organization is different so it all comes down to what works best for you and your organization.
Thirdly, train your team on what it means to give quality feedback. A lot of us struggle to give feedback naturally so we need to take some time to learn what that looks like in order to comfortably share effective feedback to our teammates. There are plenty of options available online so I recommend finding what works best for your situation and sharing the resources with your team. No matter how often your team solicits feedback from others, if it’s not helpful if the feedback isn’t structured and lacking substance.
Finally, make it your own! Remember to start small with the amount of questions and the scope of the roll out. Start with your direct reports/team members and then fan out a working process within the organization when appropriate. Better to fail fast and iterate than wait too long to launch 🚀
Thanks for tuning in, and as always, happy hacking! 👨💻