We crave for feedback

Feedback is important. From our childhood on.

We all want to learn. And we crave feedback for it. It starts in our childhood:
Children look for games and tasks that are diagnostic for them. This means that they prefer to choose tasks that correspond to their abilities and hope to receive feedback about their skills.
The toys for children are designed to match their age and skill level. So they are made to give feedback to the kids directly. This comes easy to us in our childhood - it’s all fun and games. But it’s not as easy when we grow up and are entering the professional world. Restrictions fall into place: workplace, projects, tasks and requirements are only partially self-determined and must be carried out in coordination with superiors and company goals.

At the same time, there is still the urge inside us to carry out activities according to our own abilities and competencies.
So we still want to get feedback.

But where does the feedback come from? Our daily work is not designed to be as responsive as our favourite childhood toys with regards to feedback. And company interests also enter the equation that have to be weighed in.

This is why having a formalized feedback approach in a company is important.

At up.lftd, we have decided to build on a form of 360° feedback - feedback from everyone that a person is interacting with. This is actually a common procedure, but we do it a little differently. We take great care to ensure that the whole process is fair, so we designed it a little different.

My company. My social group.

In our childhood we get feedback from the toys and get it directly without other people involved. In our working life, we exist in a social group and get feedback from our co-workers. So the feedback will always be in relation to this group and the goals of our peers in that group. Moreover, the competencies are no longer diagnostic only for myself, but also for the social group and the workplace I am in.

That is *why we group companies into sub-units**, such as departments, units and project groups, to be able to slice and dice the social groups that each person interacts within.

We make sure everyone gets continious and fair feedback.

For each job profile in the context of that social group, the fitting skills and competencies needed to perform that particular job are selected.

We then ask feedback about a person directly from the people who have been in direct contact with that specific person, spanning their different social groups. This way we get insights about questions such as: Am I myself a good fit for my job? How do I stand within my team, how can I develop, where could I use some support, where are my strengths? Where can I offer support to others?

We ask for feedback continuously and directly after interactions happened, so we gather a fresh and immediate perspective.

And we correct the feedback values for biases and other subjective factors. Because we want to make the feedback as fair as possible and provide a more realistic picture for each employee in their own development profile. Feedback to evaluated persons must be corrected, as biases regularly occur. These are given by the fact that feedback givers have their own response behavior. You could say that they map their own reality. We correct for the distributions of each person’s responses, so that personal response preferences are removed from the response behavior and a more objective, fair picture can emerge across all feedback givers.

Interested to learn more about how we make these corrections to support the feedback givers to give a broad and realistic assessment? And also how the evaluated employees learn as much as possible and realistically about themselves and their skills? Stay tuned for following posts where we will dive deeper into these topics.

Want to learn more about up.lftd and how to engage and develop your talent? Get in touch for a product demo!

Let’s help people grow.