Mechanisms for giving feedback

Photo by @ruimagalhaes

I mentioned in a previous post that giving feedback is one of the highest impact activities that you can do on a startup’s day-to-day. Both because of the influence it has on people’s performance, but also on their motivation.

During school, feedback came from our teachers — they made us aware of our performance, evolution, and how we could improve. This was mainly done through tests and quarterly reviews.

At startups, there are usually no tests to evaluate people, but there should be mechanisms for giving feedback, and thus improve and motivate ourselves. Two mechanisms for giving feedback are:

• Feedback via 1-on-1s
• Immediate feedback after action

I recommend a mix of the two.

Feedback given immediately after action has high impact. That happens because:

• There’s a psychology effect on people when feedback is given imediatly, making it much rememberable than if taken days after. For example, if feedback is positive, your brain takes it as a reward, and will consequently want to repeat it.
• Since the action has just been taken, people have all the context to understand your words, which can be more difficult if given days after.
• Negative feedback, given days after the event, can actually feel unwelcome — “Why haven’t you told me this on that moment? Why have you saved this to tell me now?”, it’s what people sometimes think in case you had the opportunity to tell them at the moment and didn’t.

Every feedback that couldn’t be done immediately after action should take place at 1-on-1s meetings. 1-on-1s are also great because of being a place for people to speak without rushing against time, and the right place to speak whatever is on our minds, thus resulting in richer conversations.

Whatever you choose, it’s important to have feedback mechanisms. And with mechanisms, I mean triggers that makes it natural for people to give and receive feedback from each other — the influence in the company has a multiplier factor.

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In the next post I will be writing about how to give proper feedback. Follow our publication in case you would like to be notified.