Firing up some remote feedback with My Three Things

Finding the time to give remote feedback – outside of formal one-to-ones – is challenging when you’re part of a distributed team. It can be tricky to find the ‘right moment’ in a day dominated by deep work, meetings and slack exchanges.

So we decided to experiment with consciously creating that moment – a mass moment – where feedback could flow freely in all directions simultaneously.

Introducing My Three Things (M3T)

Thanks to Lizzie for the inspo. Here’s how it’s supposed to go down.

1. You nominate five people you work with closely day-to-day (could be any number)
2. Those people provide remote feedback by answering questions along the lines of: What have you really noticed? and What would you like to see more of?
3. The feedback is collated, lightly anonymised (by a discreet HR-type) and shared with you
4. You read and reflect on it all and come up with three things you’re going to work on moving forward
5. You share those with the team for accountability – and because sharing is nice

How did it go?

First up, it was universally well-received – the concept at least. Everyone was happy to get involved.

There were more than five people I wanted feedback from, which then made it tricky to leave people out – what signal might that send? In the end I opted to omit the people I thought would be most comfortable providing feedback directly, if asked.

The nomination process was revealing in itself. Visualised, the nominations provide a useful map of the organisation’s nexus points. Who the ‘connectors’ are that work with lots of people – and who might be at risk of feeling isolated.

Thinking about people and providing considered remote feedback takes a lot longer than we maybe anticipated. We’d guessed at maybe minutes per person, but I’d say it was closer to 15. Everyone wanted to do the right thing by their colleagues – and some had up to nine requests for feedback. It’s a big time commitment requiring concentration. With hindsight we’d perhaps have limited the number of questions asked, which were a little duplicative.

Coordinating the collection, assimilation and distribution of feedback was a headache with around 20 people. For a bigger company, it could get totally out of hand – although there must be a tool somewhere that does this for a $5/person/month subscription. Thankfully, Lizzie came up with a genius Google Sheets > ChatGPT > Canva automation that crafted beautifully designed, personalised PDFs with a minimum of fuss (but a fair bit of fanfare).

The all-company sharing session was a really positive, wholesome experience. It was fascinating to see what people had taken from their feedback, and interesting to see company-wide patterns emerge. People committing to share more of what they’re working on, and asking for help to spread the load were two themes I noticed.

We now need to think about how we activate the data – isn’t that always the challenge? How to remind people of their pledges, hold them accountable (with a suitably light touch) and encourage them to take positive action.

And My Three Things?

Feedback tends to flow downwards, rather than upwards within an organisation, so I don’t tend to get much (conscious I should probably ask for it more).

The congruence was a real surprise – it was almost as if it was a coordinated effort to point me in the right direction. The nice stuff made me blush, the ‘developmental’ feedback was nowhere near as harsh as my self-talk.

And in the spirit of working in public, I guess I should share my three things:

1. To be clearer on specific requests, actions, owners and deadlines – apparently I have a tendency to be vague and leave things open to interpretation
2. To facilitate more collaborative sessions with junior team members – because facilitating is something I’m apparently good at 😊
3. To share more of my thinking around strategy and initiatives – too much of my company communications currently relate to commercials

Not sure how much progress I’ve made so far, but it’s out there now, so I guess I need to up my game. Thanks for the remote feedback, folks.