Optimising Efficiency — A Workplace Experiment

Peergrade’s office is buzzing these days, as our team has more than doubled over the course of this summer. As a relatively young startup, we are still establishing our company culture and finding news ways to improve our work efficiency. To get a better and more structured overview of what each of our team members is doing, we decided to try out something new. So following our passion for the potential of Peergrade, the idea was to see how we could use the system at our own workplace.

So How Did We Set It Up?

Each team member has to hand in a short description of what they have been working on in the past two weeks. This assignment is then uploaded on Peergrade before a set deadline, followed by giving honest and constructive feedback. In comparison to the anonymised set-up of academic peer-reviewing otherwise offered on Peergrade, the feedback giver and receiver were known.

In the assignment, we decided to follow three criteria:

1. The great parts of the team member’s work;
2. What could have been improved, and
3. Whether the person could change their focus in order to work more efficiently.

This is how it looks

The ‘peer-grading’ phase was followed by the possibility to respond to the feedback received by marking the feedback as useful or not. Additionally, the plan was to follow the assignment up with one-on-one conversations with the CEO to ensure that everyone is happy and developing the way they want.

How Did It Work?

Being one of the the new team members here at the office, this work experiment proved to be an interesting learning process on different fronts. From a personal side, setting up a bi-weekly status report has proved to be a very effective way of keeping track of my workflow. How better to optimise your work than having written down what you did and when (reaching the ultimate goal of being organised)? But it also proved to be surprisingly challenging to offer constructive feedback to my colleagues.

Our team has people from very different fields (from IT to humanities), and as such, it brought forth the obvious question of whether it make sense to give feedback to all members of the team? Coming from a communications background, I cannot say that I can contribute with much input to the work of our tech people, whereas it might be possibly easier for them to comment on my work or offer new ideas. There’s also different levels of experience and knowledge within the company, and being a newbie at the office made giving feedback to our CEO’s work a somewhat awkward process the first few times.

While I might not have that much to say about the tech team’s work, this practical exercise has improved my ability to provide constructive feedback to my closest team members (aka ‘The Sales and Marketing Team’).

So what’s the takeaway from this?

Now it has been about two months since we started. The whole idea with our internal feedback experiment has been to find a formalised way to give each other feedback that would be focused on what people are doing right, and on giving good ideas on how to perform even better. As a young but growing workplace, its been about ensuring the happiness and development of each of our team members.

So where are we now? Speaking for all of us here at the office, I can say that it has been a learning process and a rewarding one, for that matter. Personally, it has been great receiving regular input from my colleagues about my work, but also following what they have been working on.

Being a growing team, our bi-weekly experiment has offered us a more open work environment where we can learn collectively and also get to know each other. Though it’s still the early days of our bi-weekly reports and we’re still learning how to make it more efficient, it’s already played an important part in shaping the company culture.

What interesting office experiments have you made at your workplace?

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