Guide for internal communication

Communication is key for a successful launch of new initiatives, tools or processes. These assets help you ensure a great start!

Updated over a week ago

In this document you’ll find templates for communicating about Teamspective to your organization. Surveys, feedback discussions etc compete with numerous other priorities for your employees' limited attention, so we want to help you deliver crystal clear communication about the purpose of these solutions and responsibilities they create for each individual.

A roll-out of a new tool or process is much more successful if everyone gets a clear understanding of

  • Why is this change happening?

  • What is the expected benefit?

  • What is an individual expected to do and by when?

  • Optional but often good practice is to also mention what other approaches/solutions/benefits were considered but not prioritised.

Feel free to grab the best parts and tailor the message to suit your organization and personal style.

If you don’t find all the answers here, please get in touch with us – we’re happy to help you!


Contents


Wiki or employee handbook article

What is Teamspective?

Teamspective is an organization development solution designed to help organizations with continuous improvement across individuals, teams and the whole organization. They especially focus on building solutions people first, as opposed to many other software companies who have built around a certain process or top-down approach.

Teamspective’s solutions cover these areas (SELECT WHICH ARE IN USE):

  • Personal feedback - to help everyone get more and higher quality feedback of their work, resulting in better recognition and personal development.

  • Pulse survey - to measure our wellbeing and ability to perform in our jobs, individually and as teams, and most importantly to give each team insights and guidance to discuss and improve on these topics.

  • Performance evaluations - to provide a systematic and objective source of performance data to help us make the right and fair decisions on compensation and role changes.

  • Organizational Network Analysis - to help us understand the real dynamics of our organization: the teams, links, silos, bottlenecks and pillars of support which we may not be aware of.

Personal feedback

Our goal is to support every employee in their personal growth. An important part of that is to ensure everyone gets feedback that helps them understand their strengths, and how to improve their skills and interactions at work.

Teamspective's data has shown that receiving written feedback every month increases wellbeing and makes employees more motivated and productive, among other benefits. They have also found that feedback's impact is short-lasting: already in 2-3 months after receiving receiving feedback 1 in 5 people are significantly less satisfied. That's why it's recommended to get feedback every month.

To achieve a strong feedback culture, we will now expect everyone to ask for feedback from 1-2 people every month. This is easy to do with Teamspective via Slack or Teams.

We also want to encourage recognizing the good efforts of your colleagues. For that you can send praise via Teamspective, either privately or publicly.

Teamspective's automation will from time to time send you reminders and suggestions if you forget to do these actions regularly. If you collect and give feedback, you will not receive any reminders. Each quarter we will recognize the most active employees for their efforts to develop themselves and give recognition to their colleagues.

Is this a lot of work for us?

The short answer is no. Giving feedback regularly means that you can focus on recent events and give concrete feedback. It's enough to write about 1-3 things, which should not take more than 15 minutes per month once you are used to this.

If everyone collects feedback for themselves during the year, we will not need to do a heavy 360 feedback round at the end of the year. Usually that has taken several hours to complete, so distributing the feedbacks around the year should make it easier to find time for this.

Pulse Survey

We are using Teamspective's pulse survey as our company engagement survey on a regular basis every week / bi-weekly to help support continuous improvement and help build a routine of measuring and discussing issues.

How does it work?

You will receive a set of questions directly into Slack / Teams via the Teamspective bot. This happens on a weekly / bi-weekly basis.

Results are immediately viewable in the web app accompanied with tips on what actions to take.

How to go through results?

Every team should review and discuss pulse results at least once a month to help build a routine and support continuous improvement.

Results are always accompanied with quick tips to help take action and provide a framework for the discussion if needed.

You can find a more thorough guide here:


Pulse intro to the whole company

Hey everyone!

We’ve decided to update how we support our feedback culture on a personal and group level, and we’re implementing a tool called Teamspective. We’ve evaluated Teamspective in the past few weeks and concluded that it fits our needs well.

Next Wednesday you will receive a Slack message from Teamspective bot. It will ask you some “pulse” questions and we hope you answer honestly – it’s all anonymous. You can also add anonymous comments.

The results are summarised per team and per company, and everyone can see them for their own team(s) and on the company-level. The point here is to check those reports in [weekly or monthly team meetings, etc.], and to talk in teams about what you’re doing well and what you can do better in the future. Teamspective tool provides automatic recommendations on what you should focus on and how that topic can be discussed in your team.

This new way of using data in team meetings may feel weird at first, but it gets easier with some practice. Hang on tight and remember to answer the pulse questionnaire and talk about the results!

There’s also going to be a live lecture + training session for the whole company (and a recording of it). We’ll inform you of the date later.


Intro to team leaders

Hello team leads! Like you probably already saw, we’re implementing Teamspective company-wide. It’s going to help all team leads better understand the wellbeing and experience of team members, even remotely.

You’re going to get full access to your team's results, and we highly recommend you to go through them every time to see if there’s some alarming results. If there are, you should bring it up openly with your team and talk together what’s going on. The pulse results are anonymous but when talking, you can of course hear each others’ thoughts more openly. It can take a while to get up to speed and build a process, but let’s keep at it and talk together among team leads how to best use the results.

Your leadership is important, so we recommend that you collect some feedback to yourself through the app to see how it feels and then encourage your team members to start taking more ownership of their development by collecting feedback.

We will organize training sessions for all team leaders separately from the company training so that you’ll know exactly what to do with the tool.

Please, check in the Teamspective web app that your teams are correctly built. If not, add/delete people. You should be ‘team admins’ in your teams.

Let me know if you have any questions!


Intro to the management team

Hi everyone! We’ve evaluated Teamspective for the past weeks, and decided that it fits our needs for more accurate, real-time measurement on wellbeing and employee experience in each team. There’s also a ‘whistleblower channel’ that fits the EU directive requirements in Teamspective’s solution and we’re implementing that simultaneously. There are also other features in Teamspective related to e.g. continuous personal feedback (reinforcing and redirecting feedback), feedback requests (peers, customers, etc.), and performance evaluations, but we’ll consider using them later.

Teamspective was the best choice for us because of its feature set, good user experience, and because it integrates to both Slack and our HR system.

We will organize training sessions for both team leaders and the whole company, and the sessions will be recorded for later use.

As always, your example has a great impact on how well our people adopt a more active approach to giving and collecting feedback, and making improvements based on it. Thus I ask you all to send 3-5 feedback requests through Teamspective and let’s review the pulse results together in a few weeks when there is a good amount of insights.


Setting expectations on personal feedback

Hey everyone! At [YOUR COMPANY] we want all employees to have opportunities for personal development and getting recognition on good efforts. Some of the best ways to support it are praise and personal feedback which we can share via Teamspective.

Their insights show that getting praise and feedback regularly leads to higher engagement, motivation and sense of learning new skills at work. Going forward we recommend everyone to give and receive written feedback actively, at least once a month. The more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Teamspective's automated activation will send reminders if your feedback activity decreases, and gives you recommendations for people you could interact with. You are still in full control of what and with whom you want to discuss, and what feedbacks you want to share with your manager.


Starting to use Feedback Activation

We are updating our feedback processes and taking into use a new Teamspective feature - Feedback Activation.

Our goal is to support every employee in their personal growth. An important part of that is to ensure everyone gets feedback that helps them understand their strengths, and how to improve their skills and interactions at work.

Teamspective's data has shown that receiving written feedback every month increases wellbeing and makes employees more motivated and productive, among other benefits. They have also found that feedback's impact is short-lasting: already in 2-3 months after receiving receiving feedback 1 in 5 people are significantly less satisfied. That's why it's recommended to get feedback every month.

What happens next?

To achieve a strong feedback culture, we will now expect everyone to ask for feedback from 1-2 people every month. This is easy to do with Teamspective via Slack or Teams.

We also want to encourage recognizing the good efforts of your colleagues. For that you can send praise via Teamspective, either privately or publicly.

Teamspective's automation will every now and then send you reminders and suggestions if you forget to do these actions regularly. If you collect and give feedback, you will not receive any reminders.

Each quarter we will recognize the most active employees for their efforts to develop themselves and give recognition to their colleagues.

Is this a lot of work for us?

The short answer is no. Giving feedback regularly means that you can focus on recent events and give concrete feedback. It's enough to write about 1-3 things, which should not take more than 15 minutes per month once you are used to this.

If everyone collects feedback for themselves during the year, we will not need to do a heavy 360 feedback round at the end of the year. Usually that has taken several hours to complete, so distributing the feedbacks around the year should make it easier to find time for this.


Launching Organizational Network Analysis

We are launching an Organizational Network Analysis (ONA), and your participation is needed!

ONA is a survey run through Teamspective, which will help us identify ways to improve the collaboration, operational effectiveness and innovation ability of our organization. You will receive a short Slack survey which takes 5-10 minutes to answer. Survey is open this and next week, and we expect everyone to answer.

What is ONA (Organization Network Analysis)?

ONA is used to study the patterns of relationships and interactions between individuals and groups within an organization. As our company has grown and evolved, we may have unintentionally created silos and bottlenecks, have differing ways of working across teams, and we may not be aware of all the great knowledge and impact our employees have. ONA will provide us data on all these, helping us improve the flow of information, communication, and collaboration among employees, teams, and other units.

The survey measures several types of networks by asking you to name people you collaborate with, who gives you information, energy or support at work, and so on.

We will do the survey now to understand the current situation, and again in a few months to see how the changes we make have shaped our ways of working and what we could still improve.

What's in it for you?

In addition to helping us better understand and develop our organization, one part of the analysis will give you a Personal Network Profile. From the profile you will learn what kind of role you play in our organization's network. For example some people support others with their knowledge or skills, some might be seen as a coach or mentor, some are trusted as creating a positive, safe and supportive working environment, and so on.

All roles are needed, and understanding your current role can help you leverage it as a strength, or to develop new skills to adjust your position.

For more frequently asked questions and answers, please check this material.

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