What is it?

Feedback week is a process we run with new hires on the team to build a culture of psychological safety and teach new hires the way we give and receive feedback within the team.

What’s the benefit?

Running a feedback week with your team is fairly time consuming, but you don’t need to do it all the time. For my team, we do a feedback week when we have new hires that we want to teach our style of communication. Feedback week is just one of the tools we use to improve their communication.

The goal here is to provide a structured format for team members to give each other feedback. Through structured practice, new hires learn more about our team culture, and build confidence delivering feedback to anyone on the team. Even their manager. The hope is that, through feedback week, new team members can get comfortable with giving and receiving feedback outside of a structured format.

How do you do it?

For our feedback week, we start off with going over the way we give feedback. Once we’re sure they understand the concept, we let the team know we’ll be doing a feedback week. More senior team members have already been through this process before, so now it runs pretty smoothly.

For your first feedback week, you’ll need to explain the process pretty thoroughly. Everyone on the team takes some time to think about what they mainly want feedback on. For our last feedback week, I asked if the way I’ve been communicating to the team has left details unclear or if there was important information I omitted that only came to light later. Each person on the team will be assigned someone else to collect feedback for, along with the feedback prompt that person has thought up. New hires don’t get paired with each other. We usually pair new hires with someone more senior on the team, who knows what the process is like and how we strive to give feedback.

Remember to let your team know that the feedback should be constructive, but also the kind of thing they would say in front of everyone. If individuals have feedback they want to give that would be more sensitive, they should bring that to you, the manager, or to their people team.

Everyone sends messages to individuals on the team to collect feedback from them. They pull out the key points or consistent themes through all the feedback so they can consolidate and anonymize the feedback, and prepare how to deliver the feedback to the recipient based on the team’s communication format.

Finally, there’s the delivery. Feedback should always be given when you can see the person’s face. Partners do a quick video call or in person meeting where they deliver the feedback to the recipient. This is where things get meta. After feedback is delivered, we give our partners feedback on their delivery. Generally the second round of feedback revolves around how respected the recipient felt through the process.

Wrapping up

By occasionally running a feedback week on your team, you can develop more psychological safety, and start to build a culture where everyone is able to provide constructive feedback as it comes up.