COYOs five things for a better feedback culture

Say you want to draw a photorealistic picture of a lion. The problem is, the only things you have ever drawn are some doodles on the side of your notepad in school. How long would it take you until you are able to draw such a photorealistic picture? Let me answer that with the favorite answer of one of my teachers and mentors while I was taking classes to become a certified agile coach: „It depends!“ Well, let me add: it will take longer than you would expect. Some of us are natural talents and will only take half of the time it will take all others but we are definitely talking about years rather than days or hours. And it will take courage, discipline, practice, experience and patience.

I think this applies for all things we learn in life and that we want to master e.g. driving a car or learn how to dance or to code or (drum roll) to give and receive feedback!

Photo by Amar Yashlaha on Unsplash

So today, I wanna tell you how we started to apply a culture of giving and receiving feedback in our Software Engineering department and why such a thing takes time.

To give you a little bit more background, I will start right at the beginning of my journey at COYO in January 2017. The Software Engineering department was very small in comparison to today. COYO itself was just around 40 people in total. Today we have grown to around 65 people and counting — and that’s only in Software Engineering! The point is, that we had a small team back then and the lucky situation that the hiring was so good that feedback wasn’t really a topic because it came naturally and we had kind of a family environment. But as soon as COYO started to grow we ran into issues because kind and open communication was getting harder to realize. This is a phenomenon that every growing company has to face. Going from a very small start-up to an 100+ people company is always combined with what we call growing pains. And wherever many people are coming together to get work done, there are conflicts and problems to solve. It is nothing bad in my opinion, it is just a normal thing. But what you need to do is to find solutions and establish a work surrounding where you can face those conflicts and go towards them, maybe even welcome them and allow them to be, to learn from them.

At this point, around 2018 / 2019 nobody was trained in giving and receiving proper feedback. Today I think it was only because we just did not need it. But as stated above, this situation changed rapidly because of our growth.

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So here are a few things we did to ease the growing pains in terms of feedback, recognition and a fair and open way to communicate with each other.

1. As a first action, we tried out an online tool for giving feedback, had workshops for it and started with some first steps. The tool was in a very early stage at that time and it was not possible to give feedback anonymously. Now imagine, no one was feeling secure in giving and receiving feedback. So after some time people stopped to use the tool.
2. The first big thing with a nice impact, had been our COYO culture cards. The COYO culture is founded on 12 core values and the cards are pretty similar to the KUDO cards from Management 3.0, so whenever you think that a colleague is very strong in one of those values, you can take a card, write some words on it and give it to the person, in digital or in real life. On every floor there is a set of cards, which makes it pretty easy to take a card and pass it to your colleague. Over the course of the last 2 or so years that thing established itself that is sometimes internally labeled as #feedbackfriday. Somehow most of these cards where handed over on a Friday. During Corona times most of them are handed over digitally and get posted publicly on each others COYO profiles.
3. Another thing that was introduced had been the tool officevibe. Aimed mainly for giving feedback to Managers and providing an overview about the situation in departments, the tool is still heavily all over the company. I will get back to a very interesting detail here later.
4. During the same time we started to coach single individuals and teams in giving valuable feedback. I prefer the „feedback in a triad“ method (neutral observations, impact on your own, wishes), because it is easy to learn and it is very hard to fail, even if the feedback is critical or even negative. We also did some feedback sessions with the whole department, during annual retreats for example. Wherever we encountered a conflict between persons or teams we encouraged the people to give feedback to each other.
5. Another thing we came up with is a super large topic and it might be worth another article for itself. We established a career model in software engineering. Based on your impact inside and outside the department you can take certain steps forward in your career. Everyone is evaluated by his peers in some sort of online 360 feedback twice a year. And it is a very serious thing, because as you can imagine — payment is also involved in that. Some management people first thoughts might go into the direction: If they get more payment after getting „good grades“ from their peers, there is definitely cheating going on there. But nope, that is absolutely not the case and everyone is taking the evaluation very seriously. After some training sessions and dry runs we are very optimistic that our career model was a very good idea. And btw: It took only a few days before other departments starting thinking about introducing career models of their own as well.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

The important thing is, that after all those things I mentioned, we are still not there yet. But what we can see is a change going on. You can see a change of mindset here and there. Coming from an almost no feedback culture, we are now in the situation that even between those evaluation rounds, people want to receive feedback — from their managers, their mentors and their peers.

So the value of giving and receiving feedback started to influence the people and is valuable for them. And thats a very nice thing and drives everyone and the whole department forward. What you can see e.g. in officevibe is the quality of feedback managers receive. In the first months or even years, we had a whole bunch of anonymous feedbacks, written in a very rude and disrespectful way. Today the situation is totally different. And more and more people write their feedback not anonymously anymore.
So here is a crucial fact why I believe that is: You have to practice it. Often. Always. From my point of view, you have to do that so often, that you can see rolling eyes in peoples faces, because they are so annoyed only by the word „feedback“. But if the values kicks in only once, you made a good job.

We are still not at the end of the road but at least we made some good progress so far — and in my honest opinion — thats what it is all about. Progress. And the lion is going to look better from month to month!