Do you notice that your team is much more disconnected since you switched to teleworking? Do you perceive that communication between the team has gotten worse? You may have a lack of feedback problem. You may have had a lack of feedback problem before, but moving to remote work has magnified the problem. But it can be fixed! You just need to apply some of these tricks, the appropriate tools for your case, and the desire to reverse the situation . Here we leave you some strategies and tools to create a culture of feedback in remote teams
But before we start, let’s learn a little more about feedback and its importance. These keys will help us detect the strategy or tool that best fits the feedback culture we want to build.
What is feedback ?
Let’s get academic for the next few lines! Feedback is the information or data that a specific item returns to us to know if our decisions and actions are appropriate or not, and to reduce our level of uncertainty.
An example that you surely know is : After filling out an online form, we click on “ send ” but nothing happens. And then we wonder: Has it been sent ? Should I press again or will that cause it to be sent twice ? Has some error occurred ? All these doubts occur because we lack feedback. If instead of nothing happening, a “ sent successfully ” message had appeared, or “ error sending ” , or “ a field is missing to be filled out ” , that small piece of information would have resolved a lot of uncertainty for us. The entire range of possibilities is reduced and we know perfectly well what the next steps should be.
With these examples we can realize that feedback is any data that gives us more information about our actions or our environment. And not having feedback can cause us stress and uncertainty, and can lead us to actions that do not correspond to real needs.
Why is feedback important in remote teams?
After this first introduction, we move on to the worrying part: Feedback in the company tends to be little or none, negatively impacting the motivation of employees. 79% of people who leave a company do so because they feel that their efforts and work are not recognized. That is, they abandon due to lack of feedback. I’m sure you’ve heard that saying “ I’m leaving because I don’t feel valued . ” It is neither due to an economic issue (although sometimes it is ) nor due to conflicts with the team or their superiors (which obviously also occur in those cases, I am not generalizing). Simply because they don’t feel valued.
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In addition, another problem related to the lack of feedback is that the staff does not identify their areas of improvement because no one is pointing out where they should improve. And the only function of feedback is not to congratulate and recognize, but also to point out those aspects that are not being carried out correctly in order to correct them.
Well, I don’t want to scare you even more , but if the lack of feedback was already worrying, the situation gets worse with remote work. With teleworking, each member of the team carries out their tasks in their own bubble. Their spatial context, which at the end of the day did provide some information and feedback , no longer exists. He is even more isolated and communication worsens. Perhaps before , you were still able to capture some feedback by interacting with your colleagues, seeing the faces of your superiors, or in moments where it was essential to receive it. But by eliminating all this face-to-face space, the feedback disappears even more . Therefore, isolation and problems due to lack of feedback are magnified.
For these reasons we are now going to study some strategies to improve feedback and create a healthy feedback culture in your company, especially in remote teams (although the strategy is very similar for in-person teams ).
Strategies to create a feedback culture in remote teams:
Strategy 1: Digitize your feedback system
Perhaps this is the most obvious way to improve remote feedback of all. If we are teleworking we cannot transmit our feedback in person. But even though it’s obvious, it doesn’t mean it’s easy . A good feedback culture should focus on 360 feedback, where the team can also communicate their feedback about their colleagues and superiors. A good feedback culture should focus on something more than the traditional cascade system where feedback is only given from the top down, that is, from superiors to subordinates. At the end of the article We will recommend tools for this objective.
Therefore, the first strategy is to find a methodology to do it online. You can use email, you can use a video calling tool, or a feedback tool that you will find at the end of the article . But establish a channel, a frequency and standardize it to avoid confusion and so that everyone knows perfectly how to give that feedback with clear expectations.
Strategy 2: Automate the feedback system
Let’s be fair and realistic. The lack of feedback in the company does not occur because the bosses are soap opera villains who refuse to recognize the efforts of their teams just to annoy them. Management is not sitting in an armchair drinking a glass of wine while laughing evilly for not giving feedback to its staff.
Senior and middle managers receive great pressure to meet objectives and results at the end of a month or a certain period. And they end up putting the priority of their day on where their position and salary are at stake. For this reason, recognizing the effort of the staff ends up being the task that is left for the end of the list, and sometimes it is not even done because on a normal day we don’t even finish the first tasks on the list.
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If the list of tasks is endless, it is even worse when they must also deal with a totally new reality: teleworking. But it doesn’t matter the reasons why we don’t give feedback to our teams, the consequences of not giving it are not going to disappear, they are not going to forgive us for having justification. The business world and human beings don’t work like that .
What can we do in this situation ? Well, automate that feedback as much as possible so that it is done without requiring great effort on our part. If we automate the feedback on the small achievements of the day , we already have 70% of the work done. And we already give the rest of the feedback in a personalized way, such as a monthly or quarterly video call. But this more personalized and complete follow-up is already done with a lot of work done behind it . We can achieve this with gamification. Throughout the article we will name it again.
In the tools section we will discover some that can help us in this situation .
Strategy 3: Carry out remote team building activities that reinforce feedback
Team building activities are an ideal opportunity to reinforce the company’s values. But doing team building remotely is not that simple. Luckily there are tools like GamiTeams, very simple games. and economical to carry out during a video conference or in a face-to-face meeting room.
One of the Gamiteams games is DigiKudos. It is a very simple way to give feedback in an entertaining way and making everything seem like a game. Then we will talk about it in the section on tools to create a culture of feedback in remote teams.
Strategy 4: Harness the power of gamification
Gamification is about adding game elements into non-game domains to improve user satisfaction and creating engaging task-based experiences that aren’t very engaging on their own .
At the beginning of the article we talked about social networks as an example of feedback. And social networks have learned that instant feedback is engaging. Commercial software (such as Facebook o Instagram) knows that adding gamification elements (such as the feeling of progress, instant feedback mechanisms , competitions or social interactions) increase the use and satisfaction of your tools. What if we applied these same game elements in our feedback tools?
Using a gamified digital tool (such as Zeppelean) your team can earn virtual prizes for completing tasks or receiving positive feedback. These virtual rewards also work as feedback! They are a reward for a job well done. This is a great way to improve feedback in the company, and if the tool is digital we can use it remotely.
Tools to create a feedback culture in remote teams
We have already given you some keys so that you can draw up your strategy. Now let’s move on to the tools that will help you carry it out.
1: Zeppelean. Give feedback and improve by playing.
We open the list of tools to create a culture of feedback in remote teams with Zeppelean. Zeppelean reinvents employee evaluation to turn it into a game. Gamification is one of the most effective technologies when it comes to managing and growing talent in the organization. And Zeppelean turns feedback into a fun card collecting game.
The operation is super simple :
- You register the values or skills on which you want to give feedback (punctuality, proactivity, sales, communication … Zeppelean is a blank canvas. You can literally put what you need).
- You assign an evaluation period to each value or skill. For example, weekly or monthly.
- Your team receives the forms at the frequency we have configured. Team leaders evaluate their employees, and employees can self-evaluate themselves , their peers, and their leaders .
- Every time a user completes an evaluation , receive virtual coins! With these coins you can buy trading cards on the platform. There is a ranking where users are positioned according to the value of their sticker collection.
Every person in the organization has their own dashboard with their results, so they know what the strengths are and the points to work on. Even from the tool itself you can register improvement tasks so that employees improve their results in the next evaluation . You also earn coins and cards for completing these tasks and improving results!
In addition, the tool is completely in Spanish. There will be no problems for those very talented teams, but who feel intimidated by the language of Shakespeare.
More information : Zeppelean.io
2: Google Spreadsheet + Google Forms
We don’t always need a tool developed exclusively to give feedback to employees, nor a tool that costs a lot of money. This is relevant if we are a small and financially modest team. (Or if we are not a small team, but economically modest ) .
Among the entire suite that Google offers us for free, we find two tools that can be very useful when giving and receiving feedback. These are Google Spreadsheets (or Google Spreadsheets in English ) and Google’s tool for creating and submitting forms, Google Forms.
Google Sheets are an excellent option compared to traditional Microsoft Excel due to the advantages of being a cloud-based tool. All the users that you give permissions would have access to that spreadsheet and would also be able to edit the same document at the same time. This saves us a lot of headaches, especially when the document circulates uncontrollably in email chains and we do not know which version is the most updated . With a single version of the document in the cloud we save ourselves that problem.
And to receive data in the form of a survey, we can create forms with Google Forms. This tool offers us many types of questions, from questions to answer on a numerical scale , to open text questions where employees write a short text.
In addition , these tools are completely in Spanish and are free. The only problem is that they are not designed exclusively to give and receive feedback from employees. As it is a very generic tool, not all the functionalities will fit us like a glove (as is the case with a tool designed only to provide feedback in the company and process data for that purpose). But it is still a very interesting option for those who want to grow their talent without sacrificing their budget.
More information at: Google SpreadSheets and Google Forms
3: DigiKudos
DigiKudos is not a tool for conducting surveys or ordering feedback automatically and frequently . It is rather a one-time game that we can carry out in team building activities or in meetings.
DigiKudos is a remote team building game to give and receive feedback from the team. In turns, each player must give the feedback that the two cards indicate randomly.
The best thing is that we don’t need to complicate our lives to play.We only need the team to make a video call, and for the facilitator to share their screen with the open game. Therefore, it is perfect for playing both in person in a meeting room and remotely. Or even in a mixed environment where half the team is remote and the other half is in the meeting room
You can and find more information and prices here .
If you are a large or medium-sized company and want a personalized version of this game, with your content and your corporate image, click here .
4: Tinypulse: How do your employees feel?
Imagine that we create a tool that merges employee surveys from Google Forms with the processed data from our Google Spreadsheets. This tool will be Tinypulse .
Tinypulse allows us to create satisfaction and work environment surveys to measure the well-being of our employees. An example of a question that we can create is “On a scale of 1 to 10, how Are you happy with your job?”
More information : https://www.tinypulse.com/
5: 6Q: 6-question surveys.
6Q has a very interesting value proposition: surveys made up of only 6 questions (hence its name, “ 6 Questions ” .) In addition, you choose the questions from a library of 200 questions already prepared by experts . Of course , in English ( as is customary in this type of tools).
Another very interesting functionality that this feedback tool includes is the option to give feedback to colleagues . There is a recognition system to congratulate other colleagues for something they have done. In this way the feedback not only occurs vertically, but also horizontally .
And here is the list of strategies and tools to create a culture of feedback in remote teams. As you can see, there are many resources to do this. Do you want to start with something simple and economical ? Try the online team building games focused on feedback! Here is a free demo of DigiKudos.