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Building a Feedback Culture

Author: Simone Kohl

· 3 mins read

Creating a feedback culture relies on a foundation of trust and communication. Leaders must ensure communication habits are established and bad habits are eliminated. However, a healthy culture can only be created through healthy and honest feedback between employees and managers. With a positive work atmosphere, both employee growth and performance can be increased. 

What is a Feedback Culture?  

A feedback culture is a work culture that aims to create honest feedback between employees and managers. This should make employees feel that he has the right to give feedback to others in the company. For the feedback culture to be used effectively, it should be made as simple as possible. Still, the feedback culture needs time to grow and develop. And for employees, giving feedback to supervisors can also be an unfamiliar thought. But building a healthy feedback culture is critical to the company’s long-term success. Many companies like Reddit and SAP America already recognize and emphasize the value of feedback culture.  

Why is a Feedback Culture Important?  

  • Increase Employee Engagement
    • It is important to create an atmosphere of engagement for employees to work more effectively and be loyal to the company. After all, when employees feel connected to the workplace, they also work more effectively and perform better.  So, if you can successfully engage employees, they can expect to perform better.  
  • Positive Work Environment  
    • Feedback culture creates a positive and fun work environment that influences how employees work. Having a workplace that has more of a negative work environment and that employees are less comfortable with can hurt performance.  
    • Google provides a good example of a positive work environment. There are several programs there to increase engagement and employee satisfaction.  
  • Low Turnover  
    • Employee turnover is expensive for the company. It takes a lot of time, resources, and energy to find new employees. Therefore, it is most effective for companies to keep the turnover rate lower. This applies to both employees and managers. Because qualified and talented executives can also leave a company if they feel that they are not getting ahead and cannot continue to learn and improve.  

3 Advantages of a feedback culture  

  1. Generate Data  
    • Employee feedback is data. If an employee gives feedback once a month, that’s 12 data points that can be evaluated.  
  2. Increase in Performance  
    • Feedback culture creates a growth mindset and increases performance. This is because employees who enjoy their work and understand the company’s goals and vision, and whose work is also valued, contribute to the company’s success. Continuous feedback allows goals to be optimized and expectations to be adjusted.  
  3. Better Working Relationships are Created  
    • By helping employees achieve their goals and having open dialogues, meaningful working relationships can be created. This fostering of employee relationships is important to creating employee loyalty. Once the groundwork is laid, it gets easier with feedback conversations every time.  

How to Create a Culture of Feedback  

But how exactly can you reap the benefits? We’ve collected a few tips here that you can use to improve the feedback culture in your workplace. 

  • Encourage Employees 
    • To get employees excited about this topic, you need to take steps to encourage them to reach out to you. To do this, you can let employees know that they can contact you with feedback at any time and that you are happy to provide feedback.  
  • Peer-to-Peer Feedback  
    • This is an important feedback culture point. You want employees to give each other helpful and positive feedback that is aimed at improving things. By doing this, you help employees feel valued, and it’s also useful for giving feedback to underperforming employees. Then these employees can be guided to do more successful work.  
  • Strengthen Mentality in the Company  
    • Strengthen the growth mentality that everyone in the company should have. This should always involve looking to the future. You can foster this by putting a focus on employee training and continuous learning and providing employees with everything they need to do so.  
  • Provide Feedback Training  
    • You can start the process with feedback training. Then every employee will have the same level of knowledge. Some employees may already be better at giving constructive feedback than others. Then those who have less experience with it can get the chance to learn more about it and give constructive criticism. Because to have an effective feedback culture, employees need to learn to give feedback openly without feeling personally attacked.  
  • Continuously Collect Feedback 
    • Continuously collecting feedback is far more effective than, for example, a feedback round once a year. Focus on continuous feedback to strengthen the feedback culture and improve the process with each feedback round.  

Keep a Balance Between Critical and Positive Feedback 

The conversation should include both critical and positive aspects. There is a fine line between the two. If employees have problems, you should be able to communicate that openly and address mistakes. But the feedback that is critical without exception could attack or even hurt employees. That’s why a conversation should include both positive and critical sides. You could start with the positive aspects and then move on to the critical areas.  

Conclusion  

The feedback culture has many advantages. It is a great way to develop both professionally and personally. With feedback, employees can constantly improve and get an idea of what is expected of them.   

Stay tuned!

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