How We’re Building A Culture of Continuous Feedback and Growth

We’ve been very thoughtful about how we approach performance reviews at GoodNotes.

On the one hand, we recognise the value of consistent and constructive feedback for both individual and team growth — but on the other hand, we know that “performance reviews” can feel daunting for many people.

Here’s what we’ve been doing at GoodNotes to turn these reviews into a process that allows us to build a positive culture of feedback and continuous improvement.

Our Approach: 360 Performance Reviews

• Because it’s our practice to write everything down, our performance reviews are done in a written format. We also want to take the pressure off of saying the right things in the moment, and give our people the space to think, reflect, and refine their thoughts.
• There are 4 components that make up the “360” angle: a self-review, a peer review (where we choose two colleagues to write for us), a manager’s review, and a review for our manager.
• After they’re written, our self-reviews are team-accessible. We make it a point to be open, and also write feedback in a way that’s fair and communicative.
• We organise our work into cycles, which are 6 weeks long each. To regularly reflect on fresh work, we conduct our 360 performance reviews every 2 cycles (which is approximately every 3 months).

Why it Works for Us

It’s true: our process veers away from the traditional one-on-one performance review with your manager. But here’s why it works, and how it’s helping to build a stronger team.

1. It reinforces our evidence-based decision-making culture

Think of the last time you had a performance review. Perhaps you were asked to rate your colleague on a scale of one to ten on their communication skills. But what really is a seven or an eight? And suppose you receive a score of eight — do you know how to turn that into a ten?

Here at GoodNotes, one of the pillars of how we work is through making everything evidence-based. So we’ve shaped the questions to be more qualitative and open-ended, where we can state our opinions along with examples — for example:

What tasks have you been happy with this past sprint and why?

“Introducing new reimbursement tool

Increased Efficiency — team spending significantly less time to upload the receipts for reimbursement as we previously had to spend x amount of time every month for manual checking. Receipts are now uploaded to Xero automatically

Improved Accuracy — calculation of the total amount of each submitter is guaranteed to be correct with updated currency exchange rate. No missing receipts so far.”

Sherry Tai, Office Manager

Which tasks did you go the extra mile for?

“I strived to track feature requests and customer issue reports that are on Jira. When a Jira case has been claimed as fixed, the Customer Support team will proactively notify customers the status of the report being resolved. Users appreciate that we keep them posted with what’s going from our side. I believe that’s the best way to show customers that we care about their report & them taking the time to give valuable feedback to our team. This has led to a customer satisfaction rate of x%”

Denny Nguyen, Customer Support Specialist

Our evidence-based culture is another reason we’ve chosen to conduct our reviews in a written format, as opposed to the one-on-one meetings you might typically think of. It’s important that we have everything recorded and documented, so that we can share information across the company, and also refer back to it whenever we need.

2. It promotes self-driven improvement and reflection

The purpose of our performance reviews aren’t to impress a manager, but to develop a mindset of continuously being aware of how you’re working.

In a lot of other startups, it can feel like a never-ending marathon, where you simply don’t have the time to look back on what you’ve done. We want to build a culture where our people are continuously taking the time to pause and think about what we’ve accomplished, and thinking about ways to improve or take the next steps forward.

Having the 360 angle — where we write our own reviews, plus get reviews from our manager along with two of our colleagues — helps us cover our blindspots as well, and see a more well-rounded take on our work.

3. When everyone has access to the same information, we grow together

Almost like a report card from your student days, performance reviews can often feel like one of those things you just want to hide and keep to yourself.

At GoodNotes, we keep an open and transparent team culture, so we make our self-performance reviews accessible to everyone on the team. In doing so, it shifts the idea of a “performance review” from an individual’s assessment to one component of the team’s assessment.

What’s more, sharing our self-reviews also gives us the opportunity to connect with each other better. What is someone passionate about? What are the projects that someone is really motivated about? These are insights we can unlock when we share our reviews with the rest of the team.

4. Regular feedback trains us to be thoughtful, respectful, and constructive communicators

By having a structured process for performance reviews, where everyone on the team is both giving and receiving feedback on a regular basis, we’re able to train ourselves to be better communicators.

We have the privilege of being the first workplace for many of our team members! We recognise that there’s a lot of opportunity for us to develop our communication skills when it comes to constructive feedback, and build our leadership skills.

Actively writing reviews for our team members encourages us to be extra thoughtful, and helps us practice giving respectful and productive comments that help us grow.

We’re striving to be better together

Our performance reviews aren’t meant to feel like judgement day, where you’re only being told what your manager thinks of your work.

Fundamentally, our 360 reviews are multi-directional: we give and receive feedback for ourselves, our peers, and our managers too. Our approach helps us cover each other’s blindspots (including those of our leadership!). In doing so we’re building a team culture of trust, support, and continuous improvement here at GoodNotes.

If this sounds like a work environment you’d thrive in, we’d love to hear from you. See our openings here!

Written by Elizabeth Ching on behalf of GoodNotes