Sharing feedback in the moment

How should employees give and receive feedback at work?

There’s no single right answer, and there’s certainly no universal answer for every workplace. Different cultures, lines of work, and company history mean that what works in one place might completely flop in another.

An aggressively confrontational style might be effective at one company, while a more measured approach may be better somewhere else. Some companies prioritize ruthless debate, others prioritize a positive work culture. Within companies, different teams have different styles, and within teams every individual interacts differently.

But despite these differences, one constant seems to be true across the board.

In most workplaces, employees aren’t getting feedback nearly as often as optimal. Getting feedback more often from your manager and others around you makes you more motivated in your work and more likely to stay with your company for longer.

Feedback in the moment

When you think about this, it makes sense.

A baseball pitching coach doesn’t watch you throw a thousand pitches and then tell you what you did wrong 900 pitches ago. They correct you in the moment.

In a personal relationship, you don’t tell the other person how you feel once a year and go dark in between. That would be absurd and unfair to all parties involved.

But at work, the historical bedrock of employee performance feedback - the annual performance review - does pretty much just that. December rolls around and you look back on the past 12 months and talk about which expectations were met and which expectations were missed.

Companies know this isn’t the best way to do things, so they’ve found ways to give employees performance feedback more than once a year.GE, Deloitte, Adobe, Google, and other leading companies have started to prove there’s a better way.

Many companies have moved 360 review cycles from once a year to every three or six months. It’s common for companies to advise their managers to have one on ones with the teams once a weeks. And many companies are looking for ways to promote an even more real-time forum for coaching and feedback.

Introducing Real-Time Feedback

One of the things we’ve noticed since launching our performance reviews product is that when companies use a tool that makes 360 feedback simple, they do it more often. We believe simple software can help facilitate a better feedback culture, so we wanted to build a product to help companies take this a step further.

Our new Real-Time Feedback tool is simple; it allows anyone at the company to give or request feedback from anyone else, and that feedback can be given as public praise or private feedback.

We’ve built the product to integrate with the places your employees spend their time like Slack and email, so companies can build the organizational muscle of a feedback culture with as little friction as possible.

And maybe most importantly, we’ve integrated our Real-Time Feedback tool with our performance reviews product.This serves multiple purposes, including avoiding recency bias, helping reviewers remember what happened over the past several months when it’s time for performance reviews, as well as giving people a more concrete reason to use the feedback tool and form a habit.

This has been one of the most requested pieces of functionality from our customers since launching performance reviews, and today we’re excited to share it with the world. We’d love for you to try it out and tell us what you think!