Teamspective works with dozens of types of organizations, and each of them with a unique culture. It means there's no one-way-fits-all recommendation we can offer to you, but it also means we have seen numerous different approaches and can recommend some best practices that seem to work in many circumstances.

Read on for the concrete tips and examples, starting from the easiest quick wins and progressing to bigger process overhauls. We'll leave it for you to think what is your organization's culture like, to find the sweet spot between rules vs guidelines, team independence vs hands-on HR involvement, on-demand learning vs big group trainings etc.

Here are quick links to parts of this article:

Having feedback flowing constantly ensures that everyone is on the same page and gives the opportunity to correct issues quickly. If something is creating tension, usually the best thing to do is talk about - and as soon as possible.

Teamspective is constantly improving the Feedback Activation tool to help support a healthy feedback culture. However, based on our experience with our customers a sustained high feedback activation rate might not be possible to achieve without supportive actions.

Below you can see examples of supportive actions which are being taken in the organizations with consistently high rates. A combination of tools, education, communication and self-leadership is the winning recipe.

Supportive actions correlating with high activation rate

You can use the actions above as a road map for implementing supportive actions. Start from the left and gradually make your way to the right to ensure you are not trying to make everything happen at once.

Asking for and giving feedback is a skill, which can be improved. See here for our collection of tips and assets for improving the feedback skills.

Reinforcing feedback, when given with genuine intent, is always a delight to receive. Thus it's also the simplest form of feedback to activate in your organization. Here are a few approaches that have worked in various organizations.

"Praise in public, criticize in private" - the good old guideline contains the fact that most of the time it hurts nobody if the praise is shared publicly. Sharing the praise in public boosts the impact of giving recognition for good efforts or achievements, and also sets a positive example for rest of the organization to do the same.

Many companies have found it valuable to assign a certain Slack or Teams channel where reinforcing feedback can be shared publicly. Some have a dedicated channel, some use a more general one where praises are one type of content among others.

Praises sent through Teamspective can be shared to those certain channels automatically once the admin has assigned the channel in Teamspective's settings.

To further amplify the publicity aspect, some organizations have a habit of sharing all or some of the public praises in their meetings. This can be done on any level of the organization, and the optimum could be a mix of many levels.

Depending on the amount of feedback given, we've seen approaches ranging from reading out loud all new praises once a week (which nicely supports creation of an active routine) to monthly highlights or even doing a 'praise summary' twice a year.

We can't deny it, people love competing with each other! Some organizations have found that regularly celebrating or rewarding 'praise champions' makes people give praise more proactively and the culture less reliant on constant reminders.

Champions can be either the people who give most praise, or the people who receive most praise during a certain period.

Teamspective especially encourages behaviour that creates engagement and positive vibes, thus we offer you ready-made statistics about who have been most actively sending out praise.

Some of the tips mentioned above apply also to redirecting feedback, but it being a more sensitive topic we have some more advanced best practices for this.

Organizing a themed feedback week every now and then is a good way to activate people and get them more familiar with the benefits of collecting feedback.

Choose a week and promote it in advance to prepare people mentally and get them to book some time for requesting and giving feedback. A good guideline is to ask for feedback from 2-4 people and include peers and people from other teams. That helps distribute the workload more equally and reduce stress on managers who usually get most requests.

The feedback week can be split into two parts: sending out feedback requests on day 1 (and maybe 2), and giving feedback during days 2-5. We also recommend organizing discussions about the feedback as part of the feedback week. We'll discuss this more in the next part, 'sharing in a team'.

This may sound uncomfortable to many at first, but we consistently hear positive feedback about people's experience after they have shared and discussed about their feedback in a group.

After an organized feedback collection effort, such as a feedback week, you're in a unique situation where everyone has a fresh set of feedback for themselves at the same time. Get people to book a dedicated meeting, during which everyone shares what feedback they received (everything or just highlights).

When sharing feedback, one has an excellent opportunity to also share how they want to develop, which makes it easier for others to support their development. For the people listening it's an excellent opportunity to celebrate and show support on the reinforcing feedbacks, or share about their related experiences to enrich the feedback that person has received.

We at Teamspective have found monthly feedback weeks and a round of sharing to be an excellent practice which we follow religiously.

If your organization does development discussions every now and then, it can be tied closely to general feedback activity. This has multiple benefits:

It's useful to clarify this to everyone: Feedback should be collected for development, not for development discussions!

Companies connecting regular feedback collection to development discussions often follow a process similar to this:

Teamspective also offers a solution for reliable and light-weight performance evaluations, so reach out to us if you're interested in hearing more about how to set up a process like this.

See more context from the chapter above: Linking to development discussions.

When your company has a systematic process for development and evaluations, employees learn to anticipate the upcoming events and are more likely to proactively collect feedback. Active communication remains important as well.

We have seen many companies learn that communication from one's direct manager is multiple times more effective than a more generic message from HR or even the executive team. So giving managers responsibility and tools to activate their teams can have an amazing impact.

First best practice is to set expectations: "As the manager of your team, you are responsible of ensuring that your team members develop as professionals".

Second best practice is providing the right tools: for example in Teamspective every manager can see how many times each team member has requested for feedback and given feedback. This type of visibility leaves no room for arguments.

Third best practice is to hold everyone accountable: despite of giving responsibility to the managers, it's good to every now and then check on company wide statistics so you can remind, steer and celebrate the managers on their behaviour.

Motivating is always more effective and lasting with a carrot than a stick. With Teamspective's feedback stats you can easily recognize the individuals who really put effort in collecting feedback to develop themselves, and who take the time to give others feedback to help them grow.

Similarly to what we covered in Activating praise chapter, many companies do public recognition or even rewarding of the most active individuals. Just be careful how you do it, to encourage this activity for the right intentions.