You’re probably asking for feedback the wrong way
I know I was for the longest time
When Marco & I started running our ruby on rails workshops, we knew we needed to get feedback improve the workshops. Getting student feedback & improving the quality of the event every single time was something that was important to us.
One of the benefits of running these workshops at different universities is each university has a different specialty and a completely different perspective. They just see the world differently, and after meeting and talking with the students there, we get a chance to see the world through their eyes.
For example, when running a workshop at Rhode Island School of Design, we got plugged into a value system around designing things creatively and focusing on the small artistic details. As you can imagine when we ran our event at Harvard Business School, we were able to plug into their ability to improve processes until they were at the optimal level. This was the best crowd to help us get our feedback process ironed out.
We asked for feedback from the beginning.
Here’s the email that we sent out asking for feedback after our first few workshops:
We ended up getting pretty solid feedback from this, and getting more of it than most other workshops. But, the number of people who responded wasn’t too high (two or three out of 25), and the things to improve was always a little watered-down. We got some, but it just wasn’t coming fast enough for us.
Here’s an example of something we need to improve (this is real feedback):
Move to NYC! NYC is way better than Boston, there’s no arguing with that.
First off, NYC is pretty awesome. They have some killer pizza, and sometimes it’s tempting to leave Boston behind. Also it would be nice to believe that we had nothing to improve and our workshops were perfect, but let’s be honest there’s always room for improvement in everything.
When we went to run our first workshop at Harvard Business School, we told one of the people helping us run it, “we have a system for getting feedback, let’s just use that.” She kind of chuckled and said something along that lines of, “I think we’ve got that figured out, why don’t we just stick to the standard system we always use.”
It turns out, Harvard Business School trains the students how to improve companies for a living. For homework they’re given case-studies and asked to optimize problems & companies. Running our event at Harvard Business School not only improved the process we gather feedback, but we got so much good feedback, it radically changed how we operate.
Here’s the new approach — and it’s way better than anything else out there
The Harvard Business School approach, which we’ve now adopted, is to use a Google Form and ask a few questions. These happen to be what the they thought the best questions to ask are (and after getting the feedback, we also agree). Here’s what our new feedback form looks like:
All of a sudden we started getting a lot more feedback and it was all super valuable. Here’s a small glimpse into real feedback we’ve gotten from a few of students, and immediately incorporated into our workshops:
Stop Doing: Talking about important concept right after lunch or dinner.
Stop Doing: There was a period on Sunday afternoon when you were explaining MVC. It was after lunch and it was a bit theoretical.
Stop Doing: Using a Skype chat that most PCs can’t access
Start Doing: Tell people to download XCode before the first day
Start Doing: It might also be helpful to structure the install night differently.
Keep Doing: I’m going to say this again because I feel so strongly about it: DEFINITELY keep running through the initial steps of setting up a site on Sunday afternoon. It really makes everything sink in and all the pieces come together.
Keep Doing: Learning by doing, learning the task, then the theory, and the super-practical tools that the class is built around are awesome. Also pushups. Those should never cease.
Other Comments: A great course. I learned so much. So many things that just didn’t connect when I was trying to learn this stuff on my own came together.
Other Comments:
1. I’m in awe that only 2 guys can lead the class, troubleshoot, fix issues, answer questions, do pushups, tweet and oh yeah..create a Sunday afternoon exercise on the fly based on our request. Total badasses.
2. Having a technical training background it seems like this shouldn’t work, that there’s no way we can take it all in. I am still in awe that you never lost me, that I never got behind, or felt like I couldn’t get help or get a question answered. You created an amazingly energetic, positive and supportive environment…and oh yeah, I learned a lot.
All of a sudden every time we ran a workshop, the students who were in the workshop were telling us exactly how to take it to the next level.
Here’s why this method of asking for feedback is so much better
First — the Google Form is completely anonymous
When we teach students and give them one-on-one help it’s super easy to build a friendship them. This is pretty awesome & I love spending the weekend meeting new people, who are excited about building stuff. Afterwards drinking beers and hanging out is a blast. The students who attend our events are genuinely cool people, so this is a major perk of the job.
The downside is once somebody likes you, it becomes a lot harder to give harsh feedback. While some of the people who I respect the most have looked me straight in the eyes and given me super harsh feedback, most people can’t be expected to operate that way. Putting feedback in an anonymous Google Form allows people to give critical feedback and drive improvement quickly.
Second — there’s little room for interpretation, the questions cut to the core of what we need to know
Instead of looking the feedback and trying to figure out how to apply it to improve our process, we just flat out asked people what we need to know. We want to use the feedback from our students to figure out what to start doing, stop doing, and continue doing, so it makes sense to just flat out ask for that. People generally are happy to give honest feedback, and many times have solutions to the problems that we would never have thought of. They also address problems that we didn’t even know existed (or sometimes considered an inevitable situation).
The beauty — it applies to everything
If you have customers, you can use this process. If you have direct reports, you can as well. If you ask your boss point blank these questions, he’ll probably have an answer for you too. And once you get the answers to those questions, you’ll probably start effortlessly becoming better just by being more self-aware & conscious of the feedback.
So if you want to become the best version of yourself or improve your company or organization, figure out how to incorporate these 4 short questions and watch yourself improve drastically.
