Building a culture of continuous, candid and useful feedback has been a major goal of People Ops since we started this team.
It’s been difficult to identify a solution that fits our culture and the rapid changes in teams and projects. Feedback still needs to be chased, and we realise it is because it feels awkward for the giver and scary for the receiver. This creates a situation where we’re not able to identify and support learning or rewarding opportunities as efficiently as we could - and it’s something we need to tackle to be able to grow as indviduals and as an organization.
This is going to be a major focus of the 2nd part of the year, and it starts with Peakon Grow.
tl;dr : Grow is a new layer in Peakon, designed so that every person can request feedback from a ‘circle’ (3-10 people) of contributors. It automates and normalises asking for and giving feedback. We also expect to transition all trial feedback under Grow, and retire the good, ol’ Google Forms.
Why did we choose Grow?
- It runs on Peakon. You all have login details, profiles and familiarity with the tool - it’s easy.
- The questions are based on value-creating behaviors that are very similar to what we identified within Status.
- Allows to add specific Status questions.
- Allows you to choose who to get feedback from and to change your feedback circle as needed (new role, new project, etc).
- When getting feedback, you will be able to benchmark your self-perception against how others view you. It’s a very effective way to identify how your actions affect others, and act upon it.
- It includes excellent quick tips about giving/receiving feedback. A great lesson for us all!
It’s a relatively new product and some features are still being refined.
So what is going to happen?
In the course of the next few days, you will receive an email from Peakon asking you to activate your Grow profile. You will:
- Select up to 10 people to request feedback from (3 minutes)
- Select one or more mentors (more explanations about this will follow) (2 minutes)
- Fill in your self-assessment (~ 15 minutes)
- Receive weekly requests to evaluate the people who have added you to their circles
- Requests will include scores and comments, and will ask to score 1-6 a set of behaviors that are very very similar to what we have identified as important for Status.
- See all the feedback you receive in your aggregated dashboard on Peakon
- Scores will be anonymous
- Comments will be tied to the person who wrote them
- Be able to send spontaneous feedback to anyone else in the organisation (just a simple comment) at any time.
Terry & I will be following up with more documentation and support each one of you in the process. We just wanted to share a heads up and open this post for comments and questions so we can make sure to address all of them.
We’re really excited to get started, and we hope this will add a lot of value to each and every one of you.
