Employee Feedback Process
As the company grew so did the scope of the problems we had to tackle, technical and cultural alike.
We realized at some point that the way we dealt with employee complaints didn't scale with the company's growth, and we need a new, better solution. A new, transparent way for employees to raise their concerns, others to up-vote them, and managers to deal with them.
The solution is SpeakUp, a process that defines how employees should raise concerns, how managers will handle them and allows everyone to track the progress of their resolution.
Note: The SpeakUp initiative in Engineering is separate than the Speak Up platform that our Compliance department introduced. While the former deals exclusively with improving the Engineering Department's culture, the latter offers protection for whistleblowers and a safe way to anonymously report misconduct.
Why?
Through the Engineering department's SpeakUp initiative we want to empower our engineering community to continuously improve the organization and make it better for ourselves.
It is our responsibility to do it. No one else will do it for us.
We are all aware that not all things are great, and some might be outright bad. But we want to improve and make things right.
The growth pace is high, and it is not always easy to keep up with our principles. This pace requires us to be focused on achieving our business goals, which could result in us failing to notice other issues. That is exactly why we need a strategy to deal with them.
It's about collecting and solving the most pressing issues, issues that bother you the most or bother most people.
What is it, exactly?
The SpeakUp initiative defines a process in the Engineering Department that allows employees to raise concerns that:
Are broader in scope and have no clear owner, e.g., what can we do to improve our engineering culture? how do we want our working environment to look like?
Are bothering a lot of people but have not yet been tackled since they are non-business issues but could improve our happiness and well-being at work, e.g., work environment issues.
Cross-department concerns, e.g., engineering and product development alignment.
Anything else that is out of reach or was not tackled by your line managers.
This process gives employees the opportunity to provide constructive criticism, share it with the rest of the department, discuss viable solutions and implement them.
The implementation
The process is quite simple and is based in the standard way we deal with all issues in Infobip.
You identify a problem, something that has been bothering you or you see a chance for improvement.
After reading the guidelines you create a JIRA issue on the SpeakUp board.
Other people from the department vote and comment on the issue. The more interaction the greater the importance of the issue.
Engineering managers and directors, on their weekly sync, review newly opened issues.
They assign them among themselves or some other person they find most qualified for solving the issue.
A deadline gets assigned to the task, depending on the complexity of the issue.
The assigned person drives the resolution of the task, usually including the people that are engaged with the issue.
They all work together and keep others in the loop.
When everyone agrees that a satisfactory improvement has been made, the task is closed.
If for some reason the task is not completed in a satisfactory way, it can be reopened and further discussed.
By having the process supported by a JIRA project it allows everyone to use the standard JIRA features for tracking the project and its tasks. There is also a dedicated dashboard where you can check the process' health and some interesting charts based on the task's meta-data.
It is important to actively participate and bring into focus the most pressing issues by upvoting and providing further insight for each issue so that it can be tackled efficiently and to resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
Furthermore, the process of finding a suitable solution requires the involvement of the person that raised the issue.
This way we are keeping an elevated level of transparency and it goes both ways.
The people assigned to the task know who to include for solving the issue, reporters are included in the resolution process and are kept in the loop of how the resolution is proceeding.
Everyone reports issues in their name and the process does not provide a way for anonymous reports.
We strive to provide a safe working environment and find that a need for anonymity presents a great concern that must be tackled separately.
We all must put our minds into it, challenging while respecting the status quo and providing quality solutions. Implement them, reviewing in retrospect and repeating the process to improve further.
How to give better feedback
By following the proposed guidelines, you will help the assignee to solve the task more quickly and will yield better results.
Always consult with your colleagues, line managers, people operations and try gathering other perspectives before raising a new SpeakUp issue.
Check if the same, or similar, issue already exists on the JIRA board.
Be precise and concise, if possible, provide concrete examples of cases that support your claim. Re-read before posting or ask a colleague to do it.
Be specific, stating the facts and avoid interpretations and abstract phrases ("normal", "unhealthy", "proper").
Speak for yourself, or your organizational unit. Put some effort into understanding the problem and its extent until it is clear to you what the problem is and what the solution should look like. Avoid talking about other teams and requirement areas as you might not have the full picture. If needed, motivate and instruct others to speak up for themselves.
Motivate others to participate. As more people get engaged the priority of the task increases. A common way to do so is by announcing and promoting your task on Slack and Teams.
Challenge with respect by providing constructive criticism and insight into the problem. Keep it professional and strive for a solution. It is easy to get carried away by emotions and always start with guideline #1.
Make proper use of language by avoiding degrading adjectives ("stupid", "foolish", "silly"...), humor, sarcasm, irony, swear words. Make the language work for you not against you.
You will be expected to help in solving the issue. Think about the action points that could be taken towards a proper solution.
Does it actually work? 89% said yes!
When asked after the first 3 months, should the initiative continue, 89% of respondents from the Engineering department confirmed they wanted the initiative to continue.
Furthermore, in the yearly engineering culture survey, 95% of respondents agree with the statement that everyone in the department has the right to speak up and raise concerns. Novel issues are raised with a healthy cadence usually in response to changing conditions inside the company.
Our engineers continue to show the will to participate and raise issues that were before held inside closed circles.
At the same time, managers have shown an understanding of those concerns and got involved in solving them.
To keep the process going it is important to actively participate by raising, upvoting or discussing existing issues.
And to do so in a professional manner with a single goal, to solve the issues, to create a better working environment for all of us!
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