Peer Feedback
Introducing Peer Feedback/Review
Does this sound familiar? You take over an engineering team in a fast growing startup and before you even know what is happening 30 people report to you. You try to do regular 1on1s (even though the scheduling is very tough) and then in those meetings you get asked this very important question:
‘How am I doing?’
So people are asking for feedback (please see link). For this there are three possible answers and only one of them is good:
- ‘No Idea’: obviously not the ideal answer, but at least it is honest
- ‘I heard…’ probably the worst answer. You try to give some feedback, but you don’t really have anything to share. So you start spreading rumors (Feedback should always be direct)
- You actually have worked with the person and can give good feedback. In my experience this happens not that often and this question (‘How am I doing?’) can and should be answered by all peers (meaning colleagues that person has worked with)
So what can you as the manager of that team do? Well obviously having 30 direct reports is something you should change, but building engineering management takes quite some time. One way to give engineers feedback is to introduce Peer Feedback and that also makes sense as soon as you have built your engineering management structure.
In general the manager is just not the only person which should give feedback. Look at one engineer in a team — she is pairing with other engineers, working closely with product management and design and sometimes she even speaks with her manager. So to get feedback for her the most reasonable way is to get it from the people she works with.
Peer Feedback
Let’s start with defining the main goal first as it can severely influence the design of the feedback process :
Is it about people receiving feedback about their work? Or is it about managers having more feedback to make decisions about Salary/Promotion? If it is the first, you should call it peer feedback otherwise peer review. This mostly determines if the feedback has any influence on salary. (If managers see it, it certainly will have). There are companies where salaries are determined by peer feedback and it often leads to non critical feedback as the reviewers don’t want to spoil a salary increase.
So, after defining your main goal there are still some design decisions to make :
Is the feedback anonymous or not?
So, can the reviewee see the name of the reviewer attached to the concrete feedback or does she only see the compiled feedback? Both approaches have pro’s and con’s.
Pro anonymous:
- Reviewers might be more open to give critical feedback as their name is not attached to it.
Con anonymous:
- Feedback is sometimes short or useless. Some people feel more responsible when their name is attached to it.
- Starting a discussion based on the written feedback is very difficult (if not impossible) as the reviewee does not know who gave a specific feedback. If you view written feedback as the start of a conversation, anonymous feedback is not the right choice.
Structure of feedback form
So, what kind of questions are being asked? Do you keep the form simple with just a few text questions? Do you use questions where people have to answer on scales? How much time should it take to fill out a review? In general it is advisable to start with a form that can be filled out easily and quickly.
Who determines the feedback group?
Basically the question is: Does the manager determine the feedback group or the reviewee? The best experiences were made with the reviewee determining the feedback group and the manager checking it to see if it makes sense.
Visibility of results
Who sees the feedback? Is it only the reviewee? If the goal is only feedback to the employee, it might make a lot of sense to give the feedback directly to him. In other cases it might be reasonable that the manager goes with the reviewee through the feedback.
Example
In one of my former jobs we — after making the decision to introduce peer feedback — assembled a group of people, consisting of employees working at HR and engineering (individual contributors and manager) to come up with a proposal. It took us three sessions to come up with the following outcome:
- The feedback was not anonymous, we wanted to have the opportunity to have a conversation about the written feedback
- The feedback form consisted of 5 text fields:
- Technical Skills: What’s awesome, what needs to be improved
- Cultural: What’s awesome, What needs to be improved
- One text field for a message which only the manager can see. We put that field in so that feedback like ‘I think xxx should not be in this team’ could be given.
- The reviewers were chosen by the reviewee with the following restrictions:
- The manager had to be part of it
- if applicable the product manager had to be part of it
- At least one team member had to be part of it
We introduced it by (everybody knew it was coming because we formed the workgroup by asking everybody about joining) doing a few test round. We asked people to volunteer and we did three rounds of peer feedback with one reviewee each round. After each we sat together and discussed the results (and changed a few things).
We also had a few problems, the most common ones were:
- Some people were really hesitant to give critical feedback.
- A few people were overloaded by feedback requests.
- Some feedback was not meaningful (‘everything ok’).
But in general everybody was very happy about it — that the team was helping designing it made them accept this approach and quite a few helpful discussions resulted from it.
When not to introduce peer feedback
There are also situations where you should be very careful about introducing peer feedback at all. For example if you manage a team with trust issues, then introducing peer feedback would probably not make sense.
Summary
Introducing peer feedback helps a lot in situations where a manager has too many reports to give feedback directly. But also if there are only 5–7 reports peer feedback makes a lot of sense as the manager is not the only person who can give valuable feedback.
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