#3 Set up your first internal feedback loops - 8 ideas to help check-in with your team
Adult-to-adult relationships, honest conversations and efficient communication lay the foundations for a thriving future
This newsletter is a place for purpose-led founders looking to design, build and grow a truly regenerative business aligned with nature.
Each week I share leadership ‘micro-experiments’ for you to try out with your team along with practical tips, case studies and inspiration to get you off to a wild start.
The future of work is WILD.🌱🙂
The problem with team ‘feedback’
We’ve all worked somewhere that we felt didn’t really give a shit about us.
Turning up each day, doing the work, moaning to colleagues or loved-ones at lunchtime and clocking off (generally much later than we’d like) to do it all again the next day.
Feedback tended to go mostly in one-direction and often only once a year - when you underwent the dreaded ‘appraisal’ or ‘360 review’.
If you were asked to give your views on the company you tended to dash off a few anonymous lines, skimming over how you really felt and not really naming any names.
Because let’s be real…
They weren’t going to act on your feedback
Who needs the hassle of being seen as a ‘complainer’?
Frankly… you didn’t really CARE.
This kind of corporate feedback culture is a tick-box exercise. It helps managers feel like they’re ‘listening’ to staff but it’s not really designed to rock the boat in any way.
What a wasted opportunity!
Feedback is a founder’s best friend
Knowing what’s going on in and around your business is key to a start-up’s success.
You probably already have your finger on the pulse of your industry - new products, competitors, funding opportunities and technology developments.
But what about internally?
Do you know what’s REALLY going on inside your team?
You may be small but perfectly formed - perhaps it’s just you and a co-founder right now. Maybe you’re a team of five, ten or twenty. Maybe you have an advisory board or a set of external stakeholders to check in with.
What about collaborators or contractors? Who do you work with or buy from on a semi-regular basis?
However small you are right now - tapping into how your people really think and feel is key to your long-term success.
Hearing and acting upon team feedback…
Cultivates a culture of listening, respect and adult-to-adult relationships
Encourages honesty and transparency
Speeds up and streamlines your communication flows
All of which stands you in wonderful stead for a thriving future as your regenerative business scales and grows.
Nature runs on feedback loops
For a team to function effectively - self organising, making decisions and adapting to keep up with the world around it - efficient communication is vital.
In order to communicate as efficiently as possible nature makes use of feedback-loops.
A feedback loop is a cyclical chain of events made up of cause and effect, in other words - ‘When I do X, Y happens.’
An example would be what happens when an oak tree finds itself under attack from pests.
The invading insects chomp through leaves and those damaged branches send an electrical signal back to the main hub of the tree.
This triggers the production of bitter tasting or toxic chemicals in the tree’s tissues that make its leaves unpalatable and ward off future attacks by the insects.
If your team had an issue - what would they do to quickly and efficiently alert you to the problem?
How would you make sure to effectively respond to their feedback?
Human feedback loops to consider
What you’re aiming to do here is set up communication channels or spaces to help your team share information as quickly and efficiently as possible.
This could look like:
A weekly one-on-one meeting between you and a colleague to check-in.
A social media/messaging channel dedicated to suggestions, questions or ideas.
Monthly pulse surveys sent out to all team members to get rapid feedback on an idea or a reading on team morale.
A quick-fire daily stand-up meeting where everyone shares what they’re working on, priorities, progress and whether they need support.
Quick feedback rounds after a project to share what went well and ideas for improvement or ways of working.
Quarterly check-ins to allow for more in-depth, two-way feedback focusing on career development, satisfaction, and long-term goals for the business.
A peer recognition channel which acts as a space for team members to shout out each other’s successes or contributions.
Open office hours or specific times when you (the founder) or team leads are available to chat, encouraging spontaneous, candid conversations.
You want to foster a culture of immediate, informal feedback where team members feel confident expressing their ideas, suggestions or concerns whenever appropriate.
A note on anonymous feedback…
Many ‘traditional’ corporate environments focus on anonymous feedback as a way to get unfiltered responses from team members. This can definitely work for some teams.
For start-ups though, anonymous feedback can be tricky.
For a start, there are often so few of you that it becomes pretty redundant. You’re probably going to be able to work out who said what fairly easily.
Secondly, there’s power in owning your opinions. If you want to build a business based on mutual respect, trust and adult-to-adult relationships then encouraging team members to share feedback openly is key.
Sharing thoughts in small groups, via a public message board or in an informal one-to-one chat with you can take away some of the ‘fear’ around non-anonymous feedback.
EXPERIMENT THIS WEEK:
Think about where you might want to implement your first internal feedback loops to keep tabs on how your team is doing.
Invite your team to discuss where a new feedback loop could be helpful. Decide what you’d like to keep tabs on e.g. team morale, workload, responses to new ideas.
Set up one new feedback loop this week to check-in with your team.
Make sure to ACT ON YOUR TEAM’S FEEDBACK 😉
Repeat as necessary.
Let me know in the comments how this week’s experiment goes!
What internal feedback loops have you set up for your team?
What have you found to be most effective / useful?
I hope you’ve found this micro-experiment useful!
💡 Do you know another start-up founder or regenerative business bod that this newsletter could help? Please forward it to them.
🌱 If you missed my first newsletter all about what bioinspired business is then check it out here.
Stay tuned for next week’s email.
Best wishes,
Lucy