Feedback in the Workplace – How to Get Things Moving, or the Fish Rots from the Head

Bohunka Hihlánová

Dec 23, 2024 7 min reading

In the final installment of our series on fostering a feedback culture, we focus on the broader organizational context. We explore the crucial role of management in cultivating an environment where feedback thrives. What is Feedback? Feedback is the process of receiving information about our behavior or performance and its impact on others. We’ll examine how leadership sets the tone, serves as a role model, and how HR teams can provide essential support in nurturing a culture of open communication and continuous improvement.

Creating a Supportive Environment

While organizational culture is shaped by everyone, management plays a pivotal role in establishing the ground rules. Feedback is one of the key tools for developing both individuals and teams. Systems, processes, personal examples, and communication styles are all critical in creating an organization that either fosters or (perhaps unknowingly) stifles openness and feedback. What Should Management Focus On?

If we want to move the quality of feedback throughout the organization, it must become the number one topic. We need to use every opportunity to explain why feedback is important, how it helps us, share our own stories and experiences.
Build a mindset over the long term that constructive feedback is a tool for personal and professional development, not (just) a means of evaluating performance. Encourage others to perceive feedback as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Creating a psychologically safe environment also starts at the (top) management level. If we borrow a definition from Amy Edmondson, it is “the belief that no one will be punished or humiliated for sharing ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes”. You can therefore ask yourself: Do we show enough vulnerability and humanity, or do we act more like machines for meeting KPIs? How do we deal with errors? How much information do we share with the entire organization, are we transparent enough? How much space do we take up in the meetings we participate in? Do we do most of the talking or do we give others enough space?
Remember that you are the leaders of leaders and serve as a “role model” for them. The practices you set (quality individual feedback, frequency of communication, team retrospectives, asking for feedback for yourself…) are passed on to the organization.
If your leaders are going through a development program that aims to improve communication and feedback, take sufficient care to support them after the training so that they can transfer what they have learned into their practice and daily routine. At the very least, include it as an agenda item in your 1:1 meetings.

Supporting Feedback Development at the Organizational Level

How can the HR team contribute to improving open communication? Start with an honest analysis of where you are currently and what the state you need to get to looks like. Reach for the data you have available. Organize a workshop or focus groups.

You may find that the difference between “we have” and “we want” is not that fundamental and it will be enough to focus specifically on a few teams or leaders. However, if it seems that a more fundamental transformation is ahead of you, try the following:

Prepare for the fact that this is a large change project with everything and it will be a long time. You may not have visible results until half a year, more likely a year.
Together with top management, make it a topic, talk about it wherever you go. Take on the help of ambassadors who can show in their stories how and in what ways feedback is useful. Rehabilitated sinners are ideal for this – “I didn’t think it would be useful, but now I know…”)
It won’t work without the basics. Prepare appropriate training sessions tailored to the target groups. Remember that it’s not just about training, your goal is to change what people actually do. Once a critical mass has completed the training, a new and different way of communicating will become normal and it won’t be so difficult for others to start doing things differently. Don’t forget that people will leave and new people will come. Think about how to incorporate a feedback culture into onboarding.

An essential part of the current state analysis is also assessing how your shared values and culture in general affect open communication. Think about:

What do your principles, values, and described behaviors say about communication and feedback? Can you rely on them? Or, conversely, could some of them potentially block it?
What behaviors do you penalize?
What behaviors do you reward?
What rituals, which are embedded in your culture, do you support feedback? Are there any that hinder it?
How do you make decisions? Do you encourage disagreement?

Formative Feedback as a Development Tool

Another step that managers and team leaders should consider is providing so-called formative feedback. This type of feedback is key to the ongoing development of employees and teams because it focuses on processes and specific steps leading to improvement, not just the final results. Formative feedback combines a constructive approach that helps identify areas for improvement with positive feedback that recognizes progress and motivates employees to continue their efforts.

HR teams can help leaders by teaching them how to provide this feedback at regular intervals and in a format that supports open communication and psychological safety. Thanks to this, formative feedback can become a standard part of the organization’s daily operations and support a culture of learning, innovation and growth.

Example of positive feedback:

“Great job on the latest project! Your ability to communicate effectively with the client and complete all tasks on time really moved the whole team forward. I really appreciate how you brought new ideas to the project, which the client really appreciated. Keep up the good work, I look forward to working with you on more projects!”

Example of formative feedback:

“I can see that you put a lot of effort into your last project and managed to meet all the deadlines. That’s great. One thing we could work on is a clearer structure for the reports – for example, a summary at the beginning and specific numbers in the main text. This could make it easier for clients to read and understand the key points more quickly. How could we try this approach on the next project?”

How to evaluate progress in implementing open communication?

We said that this is a cultural change and a long-term process. So how can you monitor and evaluate progress?

For training, try asking participants to self-reflect on their own competencies before and after the training. If you use a simple scale to the question “When I evaluate my feedback skills overall, where am I?” (1=very bad, 5=great) in addition to qualitative questions, you can monitor changes at the individual level and the overall trend in the organization.
If you use 360° feedback, you can also include the topic of communication. 360° feedback is also a useful tool that provides a comprehensive view of an individual’s performance from different perspectives, for example from colleagues, superiors or subordinates. Thanks to this, you can better understand communication patterns and areas that need improvement.
Be sure to add questions on the quality of feedback to your company-wide questionnaires and monitor the trend. It is common practice to allow respondents to answer the questionnaire anonymously or to sign their name at the end. The percentage of signed questionnaires can also send a signal about the openness of communication in your organization. After all, the percentage of participation itself says something.

To sum it all up

Cultivating a culture of feedback in the broader organizational context of a hybrid workplace requires a concerted effort at all levels. But if management sets the tone and serves as a role model, and the HR team provides the necessary support, the organization can create an environment where open communication, growth, and continuous improvement thrive much more quickly and with less effort.

What to do:

Start with yourself – as management, support a culture of feedback with everything you do.
Identify what needs to change, and prepare for a marathon, not a sprint.
Plan specific steps and measure progress.

What to avoid:

Don’t overlook the importance of aligning core values and culture with a culture of open communication.
Don’t underestimate the influence management has on team leaders who lead themselves.
Don’t expect results in a month.

And what’s the point of all this? Quality feedback in your organization will help:

Increase people’s engagement and motivation.
Faster development of team members and better utilization of their potential.
Higher performance and innovation.

This concludes our series. We explored strategies for personal growth through effective feedback, discovered techniques for improving teamwork, and revealed the role of management and HR teams in developing an organizational culture of feedback. Our ambition was to equip you with practical tips for harnessing the power of feedback in a dynamic, hybrid work environment.

Embark on a journey to transform your workplace into one where open communication, growth, and collaboration reign supreme. Be bold, experiment, and learn from your mistakes. And above all, strive to always give kind and honest feedback.