How to gather and use peer feedback for staff reviews

Staff performance reviews usually don’t suit the modern workplace. Running through targets and assigning a good/very good/needs improvement rating to them does get a tidy number at the end, which is useful for punitive purposes but doesn’t help staff develop as part of a dynamic system.

How we interrelate with our peers, develop our influence within the system of the workplace has far greater impact. And this depends on trust, communication and feedback.

How to build a self-sustaining feedback culture? Do this in management appraisals.

Useful feedback helps people bloom

Foundations

The following are the fundamentals that must be in place before you start.

• Workplans and Position Descriptions exist
• Leadership are encouraging an open and reflective culture through multiple methods and behaviour
• Intent for feedback-as-growth is openly stated and understood

We need to note the cultural assumption that feedback/reviews are about ‘criticism’ or ‘punishment’. Leaders must actively work to communicate this is about positivity and growth.

Step One — Announcing the activity

Communicate what we are doing, and why we are doing it.

• We want the best [most effective, cared for ____] team of professionals
• We’re looking to build a growth mindset
• Collaborative and healthy team relationships are built on considerate, specific and encouraging feedback language
• We cannot improve ourselves without feedback
• Giving feedback is a skill to develop, so is receiving feedback

Give ground rules and a timetable, as below.

Step Two — gather feedback

Ask staff to nominate 4 people that their manager will ask for feedback — they should not just be people in their direct vertical line of management, and should be distributed across teams.

Managers will only seek feedback from 3 of those people, but gathering 4 will allow the Management Team to distribute the task more evenly across staff.

Manager approaches the three peers, and gives them the four questions about your staff member:

• What do they enable you to do as part of their role?
• What are the three things you would say are their strengths?
• What skills would you like to see them prioritise growing?
• Is there anything they should stop doing — if any?

Allow a week — any longer creates drift

Step Three — collate feedback

Depending on scale of task, comfort with technology etc. these can be set up as google forms, but often the process of pasting things into one place from emails/slack is useful

Put the three groups of feedback into one document, and

• Remove or rephrase anything that’s directly identifying (‘when we worked with client X’)
• Add your view as the manager at the end — clearly identified
• Reflect on how you as a manager can helpfully discuss these. Things that have come up twice are important. For example, can you offer mentoring on a skill to develop?

As a leader, you will notice common threads across multiple staff feedback. This might be simple functional things — ‘no-one knows how the phones work!’ — or might need more profound attention — ‘75% of staff think department X is hard to work with’

Step Four — give feedback

Invite the staff member to meeting, and share the written feedback. Allow them at least a day of reflection time. Frame the meeting clearly as focused on the development, not on hashing history.

At the meeting, stay focused on the staff member, not the organisation, yourself or the feedback-givers (and do not answer ‘who said that?’ questions).

Ask open-ended questions such as: What resonates with them? What positive feedback makes them the most happy? What surprises them?

Follow up with ‘And what else?’ — the most powerful coaching question

Help them be receptive and listen to what they’re reading. Help them identify patterns and outliers that each of you are recognising — and discuss what or if the staff member can learn from it, how they might respond in how they work going forward. Adapt this step according to what works best for your staff member.

Follow up with future focused questions: what would you like this to say next time? What could you do next week to develop in the areas you’ve talked about?

Ask them what they would like you to do to support them in this feedback: What ways can I help? (what? is a better question than how?)

Leave them with an action plan — ensure that responsibility for personal growth sits with the staff member, not with the manager

Agree next steps

Note — in an atmosphere of caring empathy, and with a shared goal for the organisation that everyone is working towards, there should not be a need for any ‘heavy’ direction.

Step Five — a month after meetings are completed

Gentle check-ins in 1:1 or all-staff conversations,

• Was that helpful to you?
• What are you putting into practice?

The goal is to keep the reflection alive, not let it become ‘that thing we did last month’.

Alternative model

• Create ‘quinads’ — groups of five to commit to sharing feedback with each other
• Gather feedback as above
• Facilitate the beginnings of a group conversation and then leave them to it — creating genuine peer-to-peer conversation
• Give concrete rules — everyone speaks. Everyone has something for everyone else. Everyone leaves with improvement ideas.

This is effective only in organisations with very good cultures, with a skilled manager, and is risky if people are in any way threatened or defensive. A group coaching session to do this is valuable — facilitation and someone to ‘hold’ the emotion. I would recommend trying only after a couple of rounds of the first method.

Tips for giving good feedback — share these at the beginning

Set the frame well:

• Explicitly describe the culture you’re working to create in your organisation. Things like “We’re looking to build a growth mindset” or “We’d like to ensure everyone’s thriving”.
• State that collaborative and healthy team relationships are built on considerate, specific and encouraging feedback language.

Describe good feedback:

• Specific, and focuses on the work, not the person themselves.
• Focused on solutions, not problems
• Given in a caring and constructive manner
• Detailed positive feedback — especially on something new you have seen someone do
• do give active constructive criticism
• do give encouragement

Receiving feedback:

• Be receptive, not defensive (if today’s not the day when you can hear feedback, ask to defer!)
• Listen
• Pay attention to what you gut tells you. Sometimes, it’ll be ahead of your brain in processing what’s being said.
• Take notes
• Look for patterns in the feedback — this is feedback to take on board and reflect on
• Use your judgment while processing afterwards — people give feedback based on a specific context and outlier feedback will happen. It’s ok to take some on board, but not others.
• And if it really doesn’t feel true to you, consider whether your how (what you write, say, do) is matching up to your inner sense of self. Is the feedback of you, or of the mask you sometimes where in certain situations?
• Process it, learn from it and put learning into practice.
• Thank people who gave you feedback. It was a gift and deserves acknowledgement as such.

Tips for advanced players

• Build rapid feedback cycles into regular practice — create methods for ad-hoc submission of feedback throughout the year and talk about the at 1:1s
• Do it yourself — ask someone to collate feedback on your behalf
• Include people you work with regularly outside your organisations — partners, contractors etc

Last word

Harvard Business School researched how the focus of department head’s attention was most/least impactful. Many people think ‘I should focus on what the boss wants’, but that isn’t what the study concluded. Focus on what your team need. That brings the most success.

Don’t wait for a unified whole-of-org view on this, don’t wait for permission. Just do it.