People-Centric Feedback: How Do Businesses Use It?

Automated feedback loops save companies time and resources. One vital part of attracting freelance talent is receiving and giving people-centric feedback. In this guide, Flextribe shows you how technology can help you strengthen your HR through simple steps. Strengthen your feedback culture with Flextribe.

The reality is this: 69% of workers say they would work harder if they felt their work was recognized more. Another study showed that 92% of employees agreed that negative feedback could improve performance if delivered correctly. This indicates that there is a need for feedback amongst workers – preferably the kind that promotes growth.

As one would expect, businesses are already implementing this culture by offloading HR tasks to machines and software systems. In this article, we unfold how organizations use automated feedback sessions to optimize workforce planning, as well as improve work efficiency.

Develop talent with growth-oriented feedback

What “growth-oriented feedback” entails, is that it is set up to motivate, empower and improve talent. This type of feedback initiative is about thinking forward: it’s about a powerful learning experience for both company and hires. The result of this culture is employee enablement, or as some refer to it, talent development.

Employee enablement is a systematic approach to strategically engaging employees. First, a business provides employees with everything they need to excel through learning and training. Essentially, companies invest in their workers by enabling them to be better. This is where feedback, particularly future- and growth-oriented, is vital to enablement. Therefore, companies must optimize their way of engaging and enabling employees.

Talent development is a systematic approach to strategically engaging workers. Through learning and training, a business provides hires with everything they need to excel. Essentially, businesses invest in their workers or flexible workforce by enabling them to be better. This is where feedback, particularly future- and growth-oriented, is a vital part of enablement. Companies must optimize their way of engaging and enabling talent, let that be a full-time employee or an external consultant. A large part of performance management lies in the ability to understand what a business may provide for workers.

One of the rising ways to do this is to include room for development. An example could be to create an interview with a consultant and ask them:

What tools and resources do you already have? 

How are the tools beneficial to you to perform your job?

Do these tools ever hinder your ability to work optimally?

What tools or resources would you like to use in the future?

What you might learn from this, is more than you will ever learn from a once-a-year performance review. By engaging with external talents by asking them about development goals, areas of improvement and development, you will identify gaps in your work methods and practices – and from there, you can adjust accordingly.

Technology helps

More than 82% of leaders think humans and machines will work as integrated teams in their companies within the next five years. Machines, software and artificial intelligence are already making job processes more effortless, and with Flextribe's freelance management system, companies can automate tedious tasks and save time and resources. Dell Technologies asked leaders around the world how companies might accelerate digital transformation, and the answer was clear:

To accommodate the shift in work practices, it is not only the mindset that plays a role. Technology can help you define and visualize your company. Perhaps an online questionnaire, a digital pitch deck or an interactive quiz can help you align flexible workers with your company culture. An online onboarding process might improve a freelancer's impression of the workplace even before starting. Finally, an employee feedback survey can save you time and resources – this is where freelance management systems can come in handy.

The empathic approach

Besides the automated solution to feedback sessions, businesses are now taking another approach to performance reviews — an empathic one. It has already been predicted that workers seek companies that hold similar values, though now, it also appears that in order to retain high performers and exemplary freelance talents, companies must prioritize the physical and mental well-being of people. This is just one of the results of “The Great Reshuffle” which we wrote about in our article: “The Power of Praise”. 

Similarly, as the pandemic opened up for remote work, projects became outsourced and that had businesses scrambling for a way to manage projects and track performance altogether. This brought on another change. Steered by the empathic approach, organizations implemented new performance management practices that focus on the individual and project-related aspects of a performance review. This approach to feedback involves evaluating human-centred views and opening up for dialogue about possible changes in time management and individual skill development. The project-based feedback has stayed since then — and organizations are now involving empathic feedback in their steps towards seeing workers as people, as well as individuals — as opposed to a single unity.

Feedback goes both ways

So, you’ve given feedback to a consultant or freelancer, and the project is over. Wrong. A two-way performance review can benefit the freelancer and your organization, and it is a great way to get ahead of the competition. Identify areas to improve, develop a plan to tackle them, and take action.

To be successful with peer evaluation, you need to relocate resources for it. Spend time composing questions for a performance review. What do you want to know? Did you check in enough during the period? Was your brief clear? Was your onboarding process seamless? What could be better? These are the questions that strengthen your business. The answers will help you create a workplace that is desired by others.

Try to consider the empathic approach — is your company considering the individual, personal contexts that might impact a worker’s needs? Is your business making time for skill development and individual learning?  Consider the effect of having engaged workers with the mental and physical capacity to take on projects: workers that are thriving, will in return create a thriving work environment and be more efficient.

We know you might think: “...but feedback sessions and performance reviews take time! Too much time!” And they do if done manually… But with Flextribe, you can build people-centric feedback loops that do all the work for you.

What is a feedback loop?

Simply put, a feedback loop is a feedback system that stores data, analyzes it, and takes action based on the feedback. Let’s give an example. A freelancer contract has ended, and you are now sending and receiving feedback through Flextribe. What a feedback loop provides is a series of actions based on feedback. For instance, if the feedback is positive between both parties, the software may suggest adding the consultant to your database for future collaboration and vice versa. On the other hand, if the feedback is negative, the loop might trigger a detailed questionnaire to be sent – one that can help the company or the consultant elaborate on what was missing or lacking during the project.

Another example of feedback loops would be the one we all know. You buy something online, and the company sends you an email asking how your shopping was. After the delivery service has delivered your package, you receive an email that asks you to rate your experience. Then, finally, the company asks you to rate and review the items you’ve bought. This is a feedback loop. Everything is automated, and depending on how your experience was, the responses you give will trigger some actions.

Essentially, a feedback loop does your work for you. You can create event-based surveys or make a series of actions follow a specific type of interaction. The loop is automated – you don’t need to do anything! Instead, you can sit back and rely on the data to speak for itself. This way, you improve your onboarding or off-boarding processes, understand what business partners want from you, and adjust your business accordingly. Get the full, 360º, holistic view of your external projects and external workforce with Flextribe.

To sum it up, with a people-centric approach to feedback and automated technology, businesses can:

1. Build better relationships with internal and external workers
2. Improve talent hires and acquisition through learning
3. Identify workers’ needs for development and growth
4. Facilitate open, future-oriented communication and collaboration
5. Provide open access to organizational knowledge