The Culture of Feedback, and How to Create it

Originally published on the Cloudreach website. For those of you who don't know Cloudreach, we are a Global Cloud Enabler based in London.

If you make it your business to follow content about culture or recruitment, you may have come across this thoughtful article by Russell Abdo about the culture of feedback Medallia have created, originally posted on Glassdoor.

If you didn’t read it: a few key points. Abdo explains how enjoyable it is to work at Medallia, because each employee has a voice and say in the direction the company takes. He makes the valid point that difficult conversations about each other’s performance are an absolute must in order to make the changes happening in your organisation real and valuable. He sums it up well when he says:

“change is inevitable — it’s how we act on it that defines who we are"

This theme really resonated with us here at Cloudreach.

In 2009, Cloudreach was two bright guys with a great idea and a lot of passion, talking in a pub in London. Today, we are over 200 strong, with offices across the globe. It’s safe to say that a lot has happened in a short space of time. In fast-growth companies, change is persistent and swift, and dealing with that change decisively yet gracefully can make or break you as an organisation.

Enabling a culture where feedback is welcomed, expected, and acted upon, is incredibly important.

If you’ve ever worked a typical student job serving coffee or folding napkins, you’ll probably have witnessed first hand an environment that could be far more efficient if management listened to the people doing the day-to-day work on the ground. It makes me a bit sick to think back to the resource waste and customer dissatisfaction that perpetuated in many of my holiday jobs. I firmly believe that the principles of speaking up and, most importantly, listening are vital whether you are a small hospitality business, or a large enterprise.

If you are management level or above, you’re likely extremely busy. Much as you might want to be everywhere at once, experience your company running first hand, once it reaches a certain size you simply can’t do that any longer. Your people on the ground can, and they will be the ones most likely to notice day to day changes for the better or for the worse. If you encourage them to speak up, and to pass on their thoughts, recommendations and feedback to you and to their colleagues, then you make everybody responsible for safeguarding your culture and your performance. And the results? Better output, slicker processes and a culture where employees are happier because they know their opinions matter and are valued.

So how do you create this?

There is an excellent article by Ed Batista (a Leadership coach) published in The Harvard Review called “Building a Feedback-Rich Culture”. If you’re looking for pointers and practical advice, this is a great start. In particular, he notes that taking the time to give positive feedback is just as key as giving constructive criticism. That’s something I’ve really noticed is built into the culture at Cloudreach; in our weekly company meeting every team is represented and called upon to highlight great work from their team members. Is is not abnormal for our founders to personally ping individuals a word of thanks for a job well done, and this is a great thing.

Another thing Batista mentions in his article is the importance of gaging a colleague’s personality and mood before approaching them with negative feedback. Whilst everybody who wants to improve should welcome constructive advice, there are ways and means of delivering this best which will depend on the individual and situation. Ideally, your aim is to create a culture where feedback isnormal, so that everybody trusts that their feedback will be heard, and everybody welcomes feedback being given.      

The problem with being Global and/or Distributed

Giving good feedback, and receiving it gracefully, is easier said than done. It becomes even more difficult when your team is cross-cultural or distributed.

In the first case, you may have lexical differences, and the ‘language barrier’ could lead to misunderstandings or mis-delivery. I used to run invoicing for a company comprising mainly Portuguese employees, and I remember one of them telling me during a particularly tense pay run, “Charlotte, you have to stop asking peopleif they’d mind sending their invoice to you. Tell them to send it! In Portuguese these things are taken very literally - if they do mind, then they will think sending it is optional!”. Stereotypically British and overly delicate back then, I’d thought my feedback on their promptness was tactful, and their lack of response was hugely frustrating and confusing to me. This kind of misunderstanding is far from uncommon - if you’re interested in the idea check out this article about cross-cultural communication.

Besides potential language barriers, with a distributed team you then have the added problem of which channel you use to communicate. I’ve personally used messaging services including Google Hangouts, Slack and Telegram extensively, as the main and most convenient method of daily communication. Whilst I love the ease of having access to your whole team at your fingertips, sometimes only a conversation over the phone, or even in person, will do. It’s incredibly difficult to control how you come across over messaging services. As this recent article in The Telegraph explains, there is an informal text etiquette of which many people may not be aware. Even an ill-judged full stop may make your comment sound demanding or aggressive! If you’re in a rush or not concentrating fully, your feedback might easily come across differently to how you intend.

What’s the solution?

Well, there could be many, but at Cloudreach a fundamental aspect that’s helped us build a culture of feedback has been our internal Cloudy principles, in particular these two:

Respect the Individual and Individuality

A basic recognition that we are not the same, that’s it’s a good thing, and a reminder to be sensitive to people’s individuality in our interactions. This mantra also encompasses the idea that each other’s differing perspectives can be very useful for our own personal development, and to therefore be receptive to feedback.

Be easy to work with

This serves as a reminder to be receptive to other people’s ideas and advice. In a previous post on Building Company Culture we referenced our belief in the “culture of yes” (always be open to assisting others, and the default option should be to approve people’s ideas and feedback, rather than reject them). This mantra encourages people to be very open with colleagues about their opinions, trusting that they will be heard.

Another good example of feedback in action at Cloudreach is our Glassdoor page, where there’s a large number of reviews. We love Glassdoor as a platform because it’s so transparent and a chance for employees as well as people experiencing our company for the first time to be really honest about us. We want to be publicly accountable to employees and candidates for our performance.

Trust is such an important element in creating a culture of feedback, so it’s key to remember it won’t happen overnight. Culture is something you must build carefully, but we truly believe it all starts with openly encouraging feedback wherever possible and, above all, demonstrating you are really listening.

4 Ways to Nurture your Company Culture in 2016

Originally published on the Cloudreach website.

For those of you who don't know Cloudreach, we are a Global Cloud Enabler based in London.

We are also extremely passionate about employee welfare and building the right company culture to enable innovation. You may have seen my recent blog post, Keeping it Cloudy: How to Build Company Culture on this topic.

I'll expand here with some follow-up actions that you, as a business leader, could use to make some practical changes this year.

#1. Involve your employees in parts of your high level strategy and planning.

This doesn’t mean you have to give away confidential information or involve everyone in every decision (that could be hugely inefficient!), but do share successes and failures, and identify places where employee voices could add to the discussions you’re having at the top level. 

Sharing your company’s progress over the past few months and outlining key goals for the next quarter is a great way to make people feel unified and engaged. This is especially effective at keeping communication channels open in companies larger than around 50 people, where employees can easily become distanced from key decision makers. Make sure you're all pulling together, not in different directions!

#2. Review your L&D Capabilities.

Do you offer any formal training, training discounts or resources to staff to help them develop? How is staff performance tracked? Is promoting/tracking L&D a feature in employees' 1-1s with their managers? 

Consider making this a key question you ask all your employees: 
“Aside from helping achieve the goals of the company, what do you personally want to achieve for yourself and your own growth in 2016?”.

Follow up with “How can we help you achieve that?”. 

Employees (particularly the most talented) are becoming increasingly strategic about their career goals and evaluating their progress. Among graduates in particular, there is a sense that they expect a return beyond salary for their investment of time and effort in your company. With that trend in mind, it’s worth you being the one to voice that they’re allowed to be a little selfish when it comes to their growth.

#3. Ask yourself how well feedback works in your company.

Though many companies promote the idea that employees can voice their opinion at any time, too often it is difficult to do so without being worried you will endanger your position or your chances of promotion. Whilst it’s a nice idea to say that your culture is open and everyone should be able to add to the conversation openly, in practice it sometimes just doesn’t work. Sometimes a large difference in seniority, or hesitation about how an issue will be dealt with, can stop people voicing concerns or grievances. The answer shouldn’t be to stifle those voices - you risk resentment growing and the voices becoming privately louder.

Instead it may be worth examining what your system is for lodging complaints or suggesting feedback. One thing that can work well is an anonymous onlinesuggestion box like this one which can be monitored by management or HR. Since we value transparency, we have a number of localised Glassdoor pages where we actively encourage people who interview or work for us to leave anonymous reviews. This is both informative, and makes us publicly accountable for our performance.

Ideally, you're aiming to develop a culture where giving feedback becomes natural:  I'll be following up soon with a blog post on how to create a 'Culture of Feedback' so keep an eye out!

#4. Consider your Company Mission Statement and Purpose. 

If you don’t have them, create them! A company mission statement is externally facing, and will help customers identify with your brand, but it also helps your employees to clearly identify and align with your ultimate business goals. It will give a sense of what you are all looking to achieve together, as a team.

A 'Purpose' (as defined in the book Scaling Up), is for your employees only, and is more about the daily motivations, beliefs and behaviours that make your company 'tick'. Defining this will help to unite your team and enable them to work more cohesively.

Good luck with Keeping it Cloudy in 2016!

Why not follow Cloudreach or CloudreachPeople on Twitter?

Keeping it Cloudy: How to Build Company Culture

Originally published on the Cloudreach website.

Inspiration

Maintaining “cloudy culture” is important to us, and it’s also a hot topic at the moment. One of our Partners, CloudHealth Technologies, wrote a blog post last year about company culture, and concluded that the culture of every organisation must necessarily be unique. One of their key ideas, which I’d like to reflect more on here, is that if culture is nurtured it will be more powerful in defining your success as a business than your brand, product or customers.

Why should you care about this?

Consider the following statistic: “57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a customer even talks to a supplier (B2B)". This statistic explains the sudden boom of inbound marketing activities, but also I think has relevance for your company culture. The final stage of a marketing cycle is to ‘delight’ customers so that they act as brand ambassadors, and I believe the same is applicable to your employees, who are really your most crucial brand ambassadors.

When potential customers first notice your company, their opinion will be founded on what they hear about you from others, the things they see about you in the news, on your website, on your blog. Well, your branding is delivered and maintained by your people. You may define it at a high level, but they are the ones who will work with your customers and inspire them to promote you in the wider market. They are the ones who will write thought leadership content for you, the people who will represent you at events and conferences. Your employees will define your profile in the market, your network, the calibre of your service and your ability to innovate quickly in line with evolving customer expectations.

Why does Cloudreach care about this?

One of Cloudreach’s core business goals is providing high quality work to our customers. The way that we treat our employees is the way they will treat those customers. The quality of the people we hire reflects on the quality of service they provide those customers.

It’s a short leap from realising these truths to committing to hire the best people to work for us, and then delivering on the cultural promises we make them so that those people stay and thrive.

What do Cloudreach believe about People?

The key ingredient to building and retaining a talented workforce, we believe, is to promote and foster a culture and work environment that provides our employees with challenging work, fulfilling rewards, promotional opportunities and ready access to our leadership team.

• In order to put the client first, you must actually put your employees first, because they will be the ones to define the client experience.
• Hiring and retaining great people is Cloudreach’s top priority because every great company is a sum of its parts.
• We rank training of high importance because we want to help individuals develop themselves and develop Cloudreach.
• We have the responsibility to provide the career growth opportunities; employees have the responsibility for taking them.
• Innovation is not just encouraged; it’s expected.
• Autonomy of and respect for the individual is key.
• We attract people because of the values we promote, but we retain them because of the values we live.

The last point is especially important to us. On any journey to define culture you have to come from point A, where you talk about how you want people to act and what you want them to believe, to point B where to live that talk becomes second nature.

In my experience this is probably the biggest area where company cultures fail - when it’s well defined but not lived. I’m not trying to say we have completely cracked it here at Cloudreach, but that’s almost the whole point: it can never be ‘cracked’, it is continually a work in progress. Problems begin if you become complacent.

How do we stay alert?

We have a number of principles which we designed to help us stay true to our purpose as a company, and these are hiring criteria as well guidelines for day to day life at Cloudreach. They are broad enough to remain relevant as we grow, but narrow enough to keep us on the right path and allow us to evaluate our behaviour and motivations.

Respect the individual and individuality

You do not have to be the same to be equal. Differences should be valued since they help stimulate creative and diverse thinking which enables innovation and makes us all stronger as a company. This also allows us to...

...Be one step ahead

As with company culture, so this mantra is true of the technology market and the role of a Partner in business. It is our goal to provide solutions before they are needed - perhaps before the problem has even been identified. This is encapsulated by the popular sales spiel, ‘be proactive rather than reactive’, which is perhaps overused as a term but is certainly crucial to client relationships. We relentlessly drive to improve all things Cloudy.

Be easy to work with

Our attitude is positive, bright and helpful. When colleagues react this way to each other, everybody’s job becomes easier. Another way of putting this is we want to nurture a “culture of yes” - which means you should always be open to assisting others, and the default option should be to approve people’s ideas and feedback, rather than reject them.   

Promote personal growth

This allows us both to maintain our highly skilled workforce for our clients’ benefit, and also to make sure that people’s individual aspirations are met. When I was a recruiter a common complaint I heard from passive job seekers was that they had exhausted their learning and growth capacity in their current role. We never want that to be a reason people leave Cloudreach. We are huge advocates of feedback. Upwards, downwards and sideways - the only way you can improve is by getting feedback.

Hopefully you’re a little more convinced now that Company Culture should be on your agenda in 2016.