What is Feedback Culture and Its Impact on Employee Development

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Quick question for you: Did your last project go perfectly? Everyone worked as efficiently as possible? No hitches? No problems to overcome?

If it didn’t, then why not? What were the bottlenecks? What stopped your team from doing their job? If it did, great! How did your team manage it? Why did it go so well? Could you replicate it next time?

You see, whether things are or aren’t going well with your business, you need to know why. If your employees are or aren’t doing well, they must also know. That’s why, no matter how well you or your team are doing, it pays to have a strong feedback culture in your organisation.

In this post, we will look at what feedback culture is, how it can help your business, and how you can use feedback to help your employees develop.

What Is Feedback Culture?

A feedback culture is an environment where everyone is encouraged to provide and accept feedback from everyone, no matter what their positions in the business.

Sounds simple, right? You don’t run a dictatorship. People are free to speak their minds. If you’re a manager, that might be how it feels. The reality for others might be quite different, though.

That’s why creating a feedback culture where input is encouraged or even elicited is crucial. It’s about empowering everyone, from the CEO down, to be open to feedback, to listen, and respond positively by making organisational changes.

So why does your business need a strong feedback culture? Well, while it might sound like some management technique cooked up by some Orange County CEOs sipping low-fat mocha lattes and riding around on Segways, the truth is, you don’t have to have a 949 area code to benefit from feedback culture.

In reality, every business can benefit from creating a feedback culture. It’s all about listening to the people who do the job so you can implement the changes your business needs to become more efficient and productive.

How Feedback Culture Impacts Employee Development

Let’s dive in and look at some of the impacts a positive feedback culture can have on your employees and how it can help them grow and develop.

1. Provides real-time insights for continuous improvement

It’s easy to assume that you know how to do things. But the truth is that without information, it’s impossible to tell whether you’re making the right decisions.

Monitoring and recording feedback ensures you’re on the right track. It gives you the information you need to make informed data-driven decisions and adjust your strategy as you go by considering any new feedback you receive.

2. Boosts engagement and motivation by recognising contributions

Employees feel more valued and trusted when they are listened to and are more motivated when they think they can make a real change to their organisation.

By acting on feedback, you can build trust between you and your employees by showing that their opinions matter, and they can always strive to improve their jobs and your business.

3. Develops self-awareness and encourages personal accountability

When your employees give feedback, they must think about their job in more detail. It can be easy for employees to accept the job for what it is without ever thinking about how they could improve things.

By asking their opinion, they’ll have to carefully consider why they’re working the way they do, perhaps for the first time. Still, do you know who knows the bottlenecks and inefficiencies of a job? The person that does it, day in, day out.

What's more, when you let employees know that their feedback is being acted upon, the onus is on them to make the changes needed to improve their jobs. This extra accountability creates an environment where people constantly strive for improvement.

4. Builds a positive work environment for collaboration

Feedback isn’t just about listening to your employees tell you where you’re going wrong. Nor is it just about letting your employees know how they’re doing. A feedback culture allows anyone in your organisation to offer feedback to any other freely, no matter what their status.

This means that your least senior employees should be as free to give leadership feedback as leadership is to tell their staff how they’re doing. Likewise, employees should feel happy to pass feedback to others on their team without fear of reprisal. This creates a positive workplace culture where people communicate and pass on ideas to colleagues more easily, improving collaboration.

5. Identifies potential and career advancement opportunities

When you start asking employees for feedback, you’ll probably find that most people have an opinion about their jobs that they’re happy to pass on. However, some people don’t just come to you with problems. Some people bring solutions.

These are the leaders and managers your business needs. The people who know the job perfectly and want to strive to make your organisation better, more efficient, and more productive.

Elements of a Strong Feedback Culture

Developing a positive feedback culture in your business isn’t always easy, and there are a lot of elements to consider if you want to do it right. Let’s explore the elements that make up a strong feedback culture so you can work towards fostering one in your organisation.

1. Open and honest communication

The first step in creating a working feedback culture is to ensure that you’ll have a safe, supportive environment where people can openly offer feedback and not fear any reprisal. You can create a working feedback culture by creating a safe space where people won’t be humiliated or reprimanded.

One way to start this might be with anonymous feedback options, where people can post without fear. When people see that you are serious about listening and can handle feedback and criticism and act on advice, you can branch out into more direct forms of feedback.

2. Regular and timely feedback

Feedback isn’t a one-time thing. You can’t just ask everyone to give you feedback and make all the improvements required to make your business run perfectly. Instead, you need to implement systems that embed regular and timely feedback into your daily operations.

Regular feedback lets your employees know they are supported, and it allows you to modify your strategy based on what you hear back to ensure that you stay on the right path.

3. Leadership support and involvement

Creating a feedback culture is about creating an environment primed for change. What’s the point in listening to your employees only to ignore them? Instead, it’s crucial to learn from what they have to say and use it to implement change.

So, if you get negative feedback, take that criticism on board. It might mean that you need to change the way you do things. Perhaps there’s a better, more efficient way to do things. At the very least, it shows that your employees aren’t happy with their jobs, and that alone is a reason to implement change, even if it’s training your employees so they understand the benefit of your current process.

Likewise, if you receive positive feedback, learn from that, too, and use that knowledge to improve other areas of your business or pass that information on to other teams so they can benefit from the positive results.

4. Recognition and rewards

Feedback isn’t always about criticism and finding out what’s gone wrong. Sometimes, you need to channel your inner Bing Crosby and remember to ac-cen-tuate the positive. Yes, you must learn from your mistakes, but feedback is also about letting people know when they’ve done a good job.

It’s too easy to take people for granted and assume they know they’re doing a fantastic job. This can lead to employees feeling undervalued and unappreciated. So, create a feedback culture where successes are noted and celebrated.

If you see someone doing a good job, tell them. In fact, tell everyone. Because even the most hard-nosed among us still want to hear that they’re doing well and it’s being recognised. Public recognition is a fantastic way to keep employees motivated.

Similarly, reward good work where you can. It doesn’t have to be something big and flashy – yes, some people are motivated by big bonuses. Most people, however, will be delighted with a £50 gift card to get that treat they’ve been eyeing up.

5. Psychological safety

If you’re in a leadership position, it can be easy to forget how difficult sharing feedback can be. It can be frightening to tell your boss that you think they need to change. Likewise, many employees will baulk at giving feedback to people they work with every day for fear of ruining relationships.

However, it needn’t be that way. With sufficient training and leadership, you can create an environment where your employees can offer feedback freely without fear of reprisal.

This can take time. You’ll need to demonstrate your willingness to listen, learn, and implement change to build trust gradually and strengthen workplace bonds with employees. Still, the rewards are worth it, and their impact on your employees' welfare and happiness can be immense.

How to Establish a Feedback Culture in the Workplace

Now that we know the core elements of a feedback culture, let's look at some practical steps you can take to create a strong feedback culture in your organisation.

1. Evaluate your organisation’s current feedback culture   

First, you need to assess how your organisation handles feedback. However, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds. After all, if you don’t have a good feedback culture, how do you get feedback on your feedback culture?

To make matters worse, most people tend to believe that they’re better at accepting feedback than they actually do. Managers and leaders like to think they are approachable and that their teams can come to them with anything.

One way to start is by anonymising the process. This will give you a better, less biassed opinion and is a great way to start building trust among your employees.

You can also consider using people from outside your organisation to come in and perform an analysis for you, again empowering people to give effective feedback without fear of alienating themselves or offending their bosses.

2. Define clear objectives aligned with organisational goals

It can take a lot of work to create a strong feedback culture. An open and honest environment's rewards and positive impact can be vast.

Still, knowing what you want to achieve when you start the process pays. Are you focusing on employee happiness or worker productivity? Are you hoping to improve communication and avoid project bottlenecks so you can improve your on-time delivery rates?

All of these have different goals and will require different types of feedback. For example, simple one-to-one meetings might be enough to resolve minor issues and improve employee happiness, but feedback on an engineering project may involve a much longer, more formalised written process.

3. Gather commitment and support from senior leadership

We’ve already seen how employees might find it challenging or scary to freely give honest feedback to their managers. Sometimes, it can be even scarier for managers to open themselves up to honest employee feedback.

You may also find resistance from leadership who are worried about losing discipline or looking weak by asking for feedback. Many managers will also feel they’re already open to feedback and nothing needs to change.

However, you need everyone on board to create a psychologically safe positive feedback culture. If just one member of your leadership team accepts feedback badly, it can undermine trust in the whole process and derail all your efforts.

Show your senior leadership team the benefits of feedback. Improved productivity, more efficient teams, fewer conflicts or delays, and better problem-solving. Once you have their support, you’re well on your way to implementing a company-wide feedback culture.

4. Educate all employees on giving and receiving constructive feedback

Even though you’re striving to create an open, safe environment so your team can offer feedback, it still won’t come easily to some people. That’s okay! Giving and receiving feedback is a skill, and just like other skills, it can be taught.

Consider investing in feedback training and development so everyone is engaged and involved. This training can help make more introverted staff feel able to voice opinions, and teach those people to be happier to speak and practise active listening.

5. Create guidelines for effective feedback delivery and reception

The endgame of a feedback culture is to allow you to make changes. The best way to make changes is by making data-driven decisions. That means you need to ensure that you’re getting consistent, organisation-wide feedback.

Psychologically, there are huge advantages to having guidelines for feedback, too. When employees know that every manager follows the same procedures for feedback, they know what to expect and understand what’s expected of them. This helps emphasise that it is a feedback culture, not just a gimmick or a quirk of one particular member of the leadership team.

6. Implement tools like performance reviews and feedback systems

It’s a lot of work to create a strong feedback culture. Make sure it sticks. The best way to achieve this is to enshrine it into your processes. Don’t rely on remembering to ask for feedback; people will soon forget, and you’ll be right back to square one.

Instead, you want to make it a habit. Create formalised performance reviews and ensure that they’re pre scheduled for each employee, and be sure that guidelines and training are adhered to to get consistent results. Embed the feedback process into your computer systems. Have regular feedback meetings where leadership can discuss feedback and work to implement the necessary changes.

7. Integrate feedback discussions into regular team interactions

Finally, you want to ensure that feedback goes in all directions, and that involves ensuring you have open discussions within your teams where team members are happy to offer ideas and suggestions.

Have regular feedback sessions where you discuss feedback. Have group reviews at the end of projects so you can learn from your successes and mistakes. Add feedback as an item on your agenda. Oh, and make sure it goes before AOB, or you’ll never hear what your team has to say.

Key Takeaways

Creating a feedback culture for your business can greatly impact your employees and your business. From building trust and improving engagement to ensuring the happiness and productivity of your workers, feedback culture can enhance your employees' jobs.

Of course, it’s not just as simple as asking for feedback, and you’ll need to ensure that you foster the right environment, put training, guidelines and systems into place, and act on the information you receive. Ultimately, the juice is worth the squeeze; a positive feedback culture can improve your life, make your business more efficient, and make your employees happier.

Author Bio

J.P. Walti is the Vice-President of Marketing, Creative, and Web at RingCentral, an AI-powered communications software provider. He has two decades’ worth of experience in the marketing and creative fields. Here is his LinkedIn.