In 2020, the most challenging year in recent times, speak “the new normal< /span>” is annoying. But if there’s one thing that has become different this year, it’s the feedback.
The “new feedback” – this term is horrible, I know, but it is very necessary – as physical and social contact was restricted, the work became all remote, causing us to have new concerns and risks in our professional routine.
Following most of the research that attributes teleworking to quality of life, I decided to share a little reality to rub in the face of those who do research that: quality of life is not working from home.
According to a survey conducted by LinkedIn (published by InfoMoney) , 62% of professionals are more anxious and stressed about their work than they were before.
In my opinion, this issue of quality of life is much closer to having a job with career tracking and clear goals about its development, in which we have time to learn and having more time with our family and friends than having to work from home.
But what does this have to do with feedback?
Well, this is an extremely important tool and it contributes a lot to having this quality of life.
In the classic scenario where you work in the same physical environment as your team, it is much simpler to observe a behavior of sadness, joy or anxiety, for example.
That’s because the fact that you are in face-to-face contact with a person and with a keen perception, makes you able to recognize these feelings in the air and act promptly on those people.
In remote work we stay inside our homes, usually with a much higher workload than in face-to-face work, making people’s mental stress triggers very sensitive, pushing them to the emotional edge. And then the main question of this text comes back:
Giving feedback to these people and teams, all from a distance, was one of the biggest challenges this year, plus all the chaos caused by a pandemic.
However, one of the things I most considered when giving and receiving feedback was my own perception of teleworking and how much it affected me.
From the fear of being fired, all the adaptation to this new reality that we are still living, to conformism when seeing that things are not changing, surrounded by the thought of “if I do, fine” and “if I don’t, fine”.
This year, feedback has gone from being formal and given in a certain period to daily.
Sometimes, even every hour, as new situations arise and are unforeseen events or new realities, in which we have to be side by side with our team, understanding and adapting to each scenario.
Talking about any kind of topic with the team, gives information on how people are feeling in their daily lives and how they look and think about the future; so that I, as Delivery Manager (responsible for the team’s deliveries), can really have a better perception about the wishes and desires of this person and the team as a whole.
But if you’re still unsure how to give feedback, I’ll list some points that are really important:
Pay attention to details!
Increasingly, talking and meeting people is super valid.
Today it’s just us and our co-workers, but nothing prevents you from understanding a little more who they are, what makes this person happy, what doesn’t, which her family relationship, what is her leisure time, if she had anyone affected by Covid-19 or any other type of illness, etc;
Learn how to read the ambient
Understand the right moment and prepare what will be said in advance.
The feedback must take place within a specific context of the event so that it generates a reflection on that and a possibility of action to reinforce or improve something;
Invite the person to participate in their own improvement
In other words, help her build an action plan for resolving that situation.
Of course, always following her during this evolution, asking from time to time how things are going;
Far beyond personal feedback, team feedback is essential.
My job is to develop a team in which the team itself is bigger than anyone else within that group. But that subject I’ll leave for another article!
I’m not even going to talk about “resource”, after all I can’t explain again the difference between resources and people in the middle of 2020.
If you haven’t learned this by now, STUDY and don’t call resource people.
Well, those were my tips on how to give feedback in this “new format”.
I understand that working with people is always being attentive, much more than waiting for a magical and wonderful dynamic for feedback, in which you fill in a sentence with a keyword, you exchange it with your friend and each one will self-evaluate and bla-bla-bla…
I hope that, with all this, we learn to be less prescriptive in managing our team’s feelings and evolution, as this makes our work and our relationships very more human.
In 2020, the feedback for me has a lot to do with a phrase I heard from a good friend of mine named Vilson Laerte: “we’re with people, working with people and developing something for people, the rest is computer, chair and old desk.“
