As remote work grows, the team spirit suffers! The lack of effective means to provide feedback and workplace communication makes relationships transactional. Hence, feedback for colleagues becomes even more critical for organizations of all sizes than ever before.
By asking the employees to examine their colleagues’ work, you can help boost workplace engagement as they learn from each other in a safe and constructive environment.
Read ahead to know why feedback for colleagues is important today and discover the best practices to maximize its potential.
Employees seek more than just performance evaluations. According to recent statistics, over 65% of employees desire more feedback, and nearly 98% of workers get disengaged when they get little to no feedback. As per Forbes, over 89% of HR leaders say that ongoing coworker feedback and check-ins are essential for successful outcomes.
Effective feedback for colleagues can help your employees be more engaged with your organization’s mission and values, foster better communication, build solid relationships, and break down silos. As a result of this, you can retain top talent and elevate your employer brand. When given constructively, feedback for coworkers can help identify and remove hindrances in achieving goals and targets and enable ongoing development.
With an established colleague feedback loop in place, your employee can-
As a result, you can help boost their productivity and build a positive workplace culture of effective collaboration, understanding, and efficiency.
In addition to significantly contributing to a healthy workforce, feedback for colleagues can further help you enhance your performance review process. That is because senior authorities and coworkers see the same employee in a different light, and many aspects of the employees remain outside the managers’ purview.
Since people spend more time with their colleagues and not their managers, they tend to be more open and honest in their conversations with their coworkers. Thus, colleagues have better knowledge of the employees’ working style and professional behavior and are more likely to give unbiased feedback.
By implementing feedback for colleagues, you can gain deeper insights into your employees, avoid feedback bias, and draw a more comprehensive picture of your employees’ performance.
Encouraging effective colleague feedback can be challenging as there are various things to consider for its successful implementation. Here are some of the best practices to allow your colleague feedback loop to thrive and help you improve workplace communication:
You must educate your employees on how to provide effective feedback and ensure that they understand the information they are offering. Take time to show them how the feedback loop works and why they need to share their suggestions and opinions with colleagues.
You also need to educate your employees on how giving peer feedback can help identify areas of improvement and devise data-driven action plans to make corrective decisions.
Anonymous feedback for colleagues can help prevent conflicts and enable the discussion of sensitive topics.
Amber, the conversational AI chatbot from inFeedo, ensures employees are comfortable giving honest, unbiased, and unfiltered feedback without fearing negative consequences or judgment. Leverage Amber’s anonymous survey platform that enables your employees to share anonymous feedback.
Remember, feedback for coworkers is an informal way to help your team improve and foster a learning culture. It should never be linked to compensation. If your employees feel that getting a bunch of negative feedback will affect their annual salaries, they will be fearful while providing information.
Do not wait for the pre-scheduled performance appraisals to nudge your employees for colleague feedback. You should be more often and ask for regular feedback, whether after reaching a particular milestone or even in the middle of a big project. It will help you resolve issues quickly before they worsen.
Progressive HR leaders often conduct pulse surveys to gauge employee sentiment. These surveys have carefully crafted questions to measure team effectiveness and understand employees' sentiments about their colleagues. It's all about getting valuable insights and understanding the pulse of the team!
Traditional performance reviews offer limited perspectives in the evaluation process and can be biased. Whereas 360-degree reviews are a great way to ensure a comprehensive assessment and gather feedback from all stakeholders, including feedback from colleagues and the employees an employee manages.
Go beyond the traditional, top-down approach and adopt 360-degree review systems.
People often provide feedback focusing on the negative aspects of their colleagues’ work and don’t recognize their efforts and achievements. This develops into a culture of criticism and blame-shifting. As per Harvard Business Review, over 92% of employees feel that if negative feedback is given appropriately, it can help them effectively improve their performance.
You must ensure that your employees’ feedback contains both the positive and negative aspects of their colleagues’ work. Greater recognition of their efforts will lead to greater motivation and higher productivity. Make them understand that it is not about pointing fingers but finding solutions together.
To enable employees to provide feedback for their colleagues, it's crucial to give them the means to share their thoughts. This is where technology plays a vital role.
Research and compare the tools available in the market for every stage of the employee lifecycle. Consider factors like performance, cost, usability, analytics, AI-enabled and integration capabilities to understand if the tool meets your needs.
Tools to conduct employee engagement surveys, employee feedback, team effectiveness survey, and employee exit surveys are must-haves in any tech stack. They help you collect and analyze colleague feedback to identify areas of improvement and improve employee engagement.
Colleague feedback, if not executed correctly, presents some challenges.
Following are certain things for your employees to remember while giving feedback to their colleagues-
Book your demo today to learn more about how inFeedo’s actionable AI can help you improve workplace communication and foster a better team culture in your organization.