Insight #1
Feedback is something that can save you a lot of time, money and trouble in the long run.
Let’s look at the communication model to understand the 'why'.
You have a sender that sends a message and a receiver that receives it. In between there is always the possibility that your information could be misheard or misinterpreted, this interference is called 'noise'.
In other words, after you 'sent' your message, there is a chance that the message gets altered or interference occurs, and the other misunderstands the message.
Imagine a phone call with the line breaking up while talking. This is noise. Like static, some noise is outside of your influence, so you would want to be aware that noise might cause you to be misunderstood. If you have the feeling that there is any such interference, point it out and ask the others to repeat the sentence. A simple 'It seemed the line cut off a bit, can you hear me?¨ is just about right and does the job.
Yet, even if the other person hears, reads or sees your message clearly without interruption, they still can misunderstand the meaning of what had been said.
You will probably know that there are many different ways of how someone can understand the same sentence, for instance, the classic statement: "The floor is quite dirty".
You can interpret it as an order to clean "I shall look to it and correct this immediately", as an objective statement, "you are right, what a mess", as an insult to your work "do you mean I did not do my work right?" and so on.
You as the sender won't know how the other person understood the message until the communication loop gets closed and you receive feedback.
Thus, best to ask for feedback to know whether the other understood you correctly or not.
There are different ways of giving feedback.
People-related feedback is one way. You want to know how your team is performing, yet, performance is influenced by personal engagement, workload and stress.
Stress, engagement or how strong the employee identifies with a group are subjective experiences and hard to capture with numbers and indicators. You can also have just a bad day, doing too much multitasking, face a lack of sleep or a monthly PMS / PMDD bashing let you perceive the workload as a mountain of stress.
Showing empathy and growing your emotional awareness as a team leader is, therefore, exactly the asset that makes a great team leader. When working and leading the team remotely, this becomes tricky though.
An anonymous possibility can be to let them fill out a simple google form about the workload they face, how they feel (mental health) and how their motivation is. It should not take longer than 5 minutes or else it will be perceived as a chore. Use this as a gateway to have an open door policy, thus, you are approachable for anything.
Another way can be the daily stand up meeting in the morning, no more than 5-10 minutes quickly checking in to the team, what the workload is, what problems were there yesterday, what is on today, and do they need help with something. You meet while standing because this is not a full-fledged meeting, rather, it is a check-in. If someone needs more input or a discussion, release the others first and manage it with the person that needs discussion directly from thereon. Else you block the other's time. I recently had a small team of three for a change analysis, so I would check in using facetime everyday for a minute at 9am sharp in a mini conference call. My call consisted of: How are you? What was on yesterday? What is the goal today? Do you need any help somewhere to do so? Any special things that popped up?
Strictly business-related and during the workday, the immediate feedback loop is the way to go.
In other words, the short response such as: "Ok, today we should prioritise A, B, C. Got it", is usually sufficient - and it takes no unnecessary time to do it. I make this a habit when communicating one way with every team I am in, thus when issuing requests, making demands or describing problems, you receive immediate mini confirmation. With this little closing of the loop, you can save an incredible amount of frustration and miscommunication in the long run. Doing a task slow but right the first time is always preferable over having to do it twice.
Close feedback loops.
The reason to have closed little feedback loops is because of the number of communication channels that you have in a team. A channel means one person can talk to another. That is one channel. If you are with two friends, you can speak to each friend individually, and they can talk without talking to you - you would have three channels in total.
(Mathematically, the number of communication channels in a team of the size N is (N*(N-1)/2).)
In other words, if you have a team of five people, you have ten communications channels (5*(5-1)/2). That is doable. If your company employs 20 people, this results in a net of 190 communication channels that talk, write and interact with each other. Figuring out where a miscommunication happened on this scale becomes now both a time consuming and a strenuous task.
You save a lot of time and energy in the long run if you start a feedback culture that works for your company. It reduces the amount of misunderstood information drastically and, from what I have seen, it seemingly decreases the “bad-mouthing behind other’s back” and "blame-shifting" quite a bit as well.
If you have short daily standups, you will know better how your team is doing, how they are feeling and how the workload is, without needing unnecessary long team meetings that everyone dreads and perceives as a waste of time.
As a team or project leader, getting feedback is essential to evaluate and track the work and time of your process. You want to be able to react to overload, scope creep, or emergencies early on, not only after it escalated.
Did this help you? What did I miss? Cheers