15Five's Feedback feature allows people within your organization to share feedback with each other at any time. This article walks through the basics of Feedback and provides best practices and resources to get started.
In this article, you will learn...
- What is 15Five's Feedback feature?
- How it works
- How Feedback impacts HR outcomes
- Key components
- Roles and visibility
- Use cases
- Best practices
- Additional resources
Access and availability
⛔️ Required access to Feedback.
👥 This article is relevant to all roles.
📦 This feature is available in the Perform and Total Platform pricing packages.
What is 15Five's Feedback feature?
The term "feedback" refers to observations and suggestions on someone's behavior and/or actions that can be used as a basis for improvement. Although it's known that employees who receive regular feedback are higher performing, more engaged, and less likely to leave their organizations, research shows that most of the time, feedback fails. This is because feedback is oftentimes provided unpromptedly, it's not specific, actionable, or timely, or it's perceived as biased. With this in mind, we created our Feedback feature.
15Five's Feedback feature was developed to help people learn non-violent communication through real-time in-app education. Thoughtfully designed with neuroscience in mind, Feedback empowers employees to take charge of their own development by giving them the ability to actively seek or provide feedback on what they want, when they want, and from/to whom they want. When employees initiate and drive the feedback agenda, they’re much more likely to act on it.
Our in-app tooltips and question prompts guide feedback requesters and receivers with science-inspired advice on how to ask for and write responses that align with best practices, and all your feedback (given and received) is housed in one convenient place. With 15Five Feedback, you can make healthy and productive feedback an ongoing process that happens outside of regular Check-ins, 1-on-1s, and review cycles so your organization can create an effective feedback-seeking culture.
How it works
15Five's Feedback feature allows you both to request feedback from and share feedback with colleagues.
Request feedback
Requesting feedback from your colleagues in 15Five can be done in a quick 3-step process.
- Request: Send a feedback request to colleagues whose advice or opinions you want to hear. Remember to be as specific as possible in your request so the feedback you receive is relevant and helpful.
- Collect: Nominated teammates will receive a notification informing them that you requested feedback. From there, they'll write and submit feedback on the requested topics.
- Review: Once a teammate submits feedback, you'll receive a notification so you can review the feedback and use it to inform future growth, actions, projects, or initiatives.
Give feedback
It's never been easier to share written feedback with a colleague in real time!
- Type it out: Open the "Give feedback" form in 15Five, then select a recipient and type out your written feedback. Use the in-app tips and suggested templates to ensure that your feedback is effective and powerful.
- Determine visibility: Decide whether you want to share the feedback 1) with both the teammate and the teammate's manager or 2) just the teammate's manager.
- Share your feedback: Upon submitting feedback, the manager and/or recipient will be notified according to the selected visibility. You can always see the feedback you've shared on the Feedback Dashboard.
How Feedback impacts HR outcomes
Incorporating feedback into your company culture can have a major impact on driving the three HR Outcomes: maximizing employee performance, increasing employee engagement, and decreasing regrettable turnover.
- People naturally want to do better, and they want to do it quickly. Real-time feedback, (i.e. immediately following an event), has the greatest impact on performance. Yet, less than 20% of people report getting feedback as much as they need, and of those people, only 27% say the feedback they’re getting is actually useful, according to NeuroLeadership Institute.
- Great feedback can increase performance by 5%–20%.
- Only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them do better work. Worse, a third of the time feedback doesn’t improve performance.
- According to Stanford professor, Carol Dweck, skills and traits are not fixed and people have a huge capacity to learn, grow, and develop into the best version of themselves. This is especially true when people are surrounded by others who believe in their potential and abilities. When employees view their own abilities as fixed and only see darkness when they face a challenge, their colleagues can light the path forward and show them a new way of thinking and doing.
- Gallup suggests that when employees strongly agree that they received meaningful feedback in the past week, they are almost 4x more likely than other employees to be engaged in their work.
- 98% of employees are disengaged when managers give little or no feedback.
- Feedback is a key driver of employee engagement. When feedback is not frequent enough, employees can lack clarity about important aspects of their work. The right type of feedback that is balanced with positive reinforcement and constructive growth opportunities can also help employees identify opportunities to further engage and connect with their work.
- 33% of professionals planning on looking for a new job cited boredom and the need for new challenges as their top reason for leaving. Giving employees the opportunity to challenge themselves can provide the continuous growth and variety that professionals seek.
- Companies that give regular, strengths-based feedback experience 14.9% lower turnover rates.
- Textio’s 2023 Language Bias in Performance Feedback report found that employees who receive low-quality feedback have a 63% higher probability of leaving their workplace.
Key components
Employees can proactively ask their peers for feedback on projects, presentations, or anything else they want input on. This allows them to get helpful guidance whenever they need it.
Help Center article 💡: Request feedback from a colleague
Employees can also offer insights directly to an individual, utilizing evidence-based guidelines to ensure the feedback is both constructive and effective.
Help Center article 💡: Share feedback with a colleague
The Feedback Dashboard, accessible by clicking Feedback in 15Five's main, left-hand navigation, contains snapshots of all feedback that you have received and/or given. Click ... to the right of a feedback snapshot and select 'View full feedback' from the dropdown menu to open the full feedback view.
The feedback that's been given and received continuously throughout the year can be easily referenced by review writers during review cycles using review resources in the Best Self Review®.
Roles and visibility
When you request feedback from others in your organization, there are two visibility options:
- Default: The feedback you receive will be visible to you and the person who provided feedback on the Feedback Dashboard.
- Extended visibility: If you select the "Share feedback with your manager" option when filling out the Request Feedback form, the feedback you receive will also be visible to your manager.
When you share feedback with a colleague, there are two visibility options:
- Share with the person and their manager: The feedback you share will be visible to you, the person you're sharing feedback with, and that person's manager on the Feedback Dashboard.
- Share with the person's manager: You can also select the option to share feedback with only the person's manager.
Use cases
Best practices
Research shows that people want more feedback. And the best way to increase the free flow of feedback is by supporting people in seeking it themselves.
Rather than creating cultures of giving feedback, we need to be creating cultures of asking for it. Asking is better because both sides feel less threatened, people get feedback more quickly and regularly, you can ask many people, reducing bias, and you can get the specific feedback that you need.
To strengthen feedback in your team, we recommend:
- Asking for feedback yourself
- Giving feedback regularly
- Implementing feedback processes
- Recognizing and rewarding feedback when you see it happening
While the Feedback feature is a great way to share written feedback, some people may prefer receiving feedback in a face-to-face or virtual setting. This preference may change based on the type of feedback you're providing.
Before sharing feedback with a coworker, consider asking them what their preferred way of receiving feedback is. You can also refer to their 15Five Profile to see how they answered the question, "My preferred way of receiving feedback is…"
The 15Five app in Slack allows employees to request or provide feedback without ever leaving their flow of work. Use this capability to request feedback on a project while it's top-of-mind or to provide timely feedback to a colleague on a project or initiative. Learn how to request or provide feedback in Slack.
As you seek feedback about how you did in a presentation or project, we recommend sending feedback requests to multiple stakeholders to help ensure that the feedback you receive is accurate and unbiased. This is because of a psychological concept known as The Principle of Aggregation, which states that "the sum of a set of multiple measurements is a more stable and representative estimator than any single measurement."
While it may seem easier to give feedback about someone through their manager, we recommend giving feedback directly. Unexpected constructive feedback can trigger the "fight or flight" response in the recipient. Additionally, giving feedback indirectly can lead to significant delays, meaning that by the time the person receives it, it's too late to take action.
If it feels intimidating to share feedback with a colleague, consider utilizing the feedback templates available when giving feedback.
Bias is a systemic error or distortion in thinking that can lead to irrational or incorrect decisions. Some common examples of bias are conformational bias, recency bias, and negativity bias. To overcome bias when giving feedback, we recommend:
- Challenging your assumptions,
- Sticking to facts and being specific,
- Making feedback a conversation in which both parties get the opportunity to explore their perspectives, and
- Listening actively.
Results from a study conducted by the American Psychological Association showed that 93% of employees who reported feeling valued said that they are motivated to do their best at work, compared to just 33% of those who said they do not feel valued. That said, it's important to not only provide constructive feedback to help employees grow but also to recognize them for the good work they're doing!
Recognition should also be a part of your day-to-day interactions. When an employee succeeds, you should have them hear about it. Whether it’s an idea they brought up during your weekly standup or how they supported another colleague, recognizing achievements builds trust and authenticity across your team. These, in turn, become the building blocks of a workplace feedback culture.
When giving recognition, ensure you’re also specific in highlighting what skills, achievements, or outcomes are recognized. Once a team member knows what strengths they are being recognized for, they can better tap into them for the future.
15Five makes it easy to recognize employees by either using the Feedback tool or by giving them a high five.
Additional resources
- How to request feedback from a colleague
- How to share feedback with a colleague
- How to respond to a feedback request
- How to manage your received feedback
- The Science of Delivering Effective Feedback (60 min): Join us as 15Five’s Director of Best-Self Academy, Dr. Jeff Smith, teaches you a single, simple, step-by-step framework for sharing recognition, encouragement, observations, and redirection. This framework will help people create safety, set a clear intention, share observations, listen, and take action.
- 10 Proven Ways to Boost Employee Productivity & Performance (60 min): Join 15Five’s Chief Performance Officer, Jon Greenawalt, and Rippling’s Director of Customer Success, Xan Gentile, as they share 10 proven strategies to effectively increase your team’s performance and productivity.
- Retention Through Recognition: Feedback, Growth, and the Rise of Self (60 min): How do you keep employees learning and not leaving? Week 2 of this Employee Retention webinar series will flip the ignition switch on individual employee growth and the rise of self. We will discuss the psychological impacts of recognition, learning, growth, and cross-cultural communication to create strong, inclusive environments that keep people engaged.
15Five Transform offers on-demand training and live coaching that's designed to help managers think as leaders who take action to keep their teams motivated, engaged, and thriving— leading to powerful business results.
Transform Microlearning is a powerful tool offered in 15Five's Total Platform pricing plan that's designed to enhance manager effectiveness within the flow of work with bite-sized learning and continuous development. The following feedback-specific Microlearnings are available:
- Meaningful 1-on-1's: Goals, Growth, Feedback: Discover what makes 1-on-1’s the most powerful conversational practice for any team leader. Learn about common pitfalls, plus a framework to help you prepare for and drive meaningful 1-on-1s using relational skills, co-created agendas, goals, and accountability.
- Hard Conversations Made Easier: What makes certain conversations feel harder to have than others? From critical feedback to conflict to negotiations. Learn the science behind difficult conversations and a framework to help you prepare for and reduce the emotional charge in order to communicate more effectively.
- Recognition That Drives Engagement: Learn how recognition profoundly influences motivation, performance, and satisfaction at work. You’ll learn about our human tendency toward negativity, known as the Negativity Bias, and how you can use the power of recognition to overcome it. Delve into a technique known as Strengths Spotting-- created and endorsed by positive psychologists. With practical steps you'll learn to observe, explain, and value strengths in individuals and teams.
On-demand training is manager skill training from our curated course curriculum and is available in our Transform and Transform Accelerator pricing plans. The following feedback-specific on-demand trainings are available:
- Feedback for Appreciation: In this on-demand Transform course, managers learn about delivering positive feedback effectively. They begin by understanding the power of positivity and why it’s so crucial to intentionally create positivity in our team cultures at work. Then, there will be opportunities to practice specific skills such as effectively recognizing and encouraging people. Managers will dive into a practice called strength spotting, the process by which we call out and reinforce people for their individual strengths and the impact of those strengths.
- Feedback for Redirection: This on-demand Transform course focuses on learning evidence-inspired practices to facilitate better conversations by sharing what you saw, heard, or noticed without layering judgments, assumptions, and inferences. Managers will learn the skill sets needed to deliver constructive feedback and redirection required for mindset or behavior change. They will practice the 15Five Best-Self Feedback model aimed at creating a safe and productive feedback conversation.
- Giving Feedback that Drives Performance: In this on-demand Transform course, we explore some of the most challenging and powerful aspects of feedback and what techniques result in healthy & high-performing teams. Participants will learn about the importance of recognition for boosting motivation and encouraging positive behaviors. They'll also learn how to create psychological safety when giving feedback, including a framework to help you handle difficult conversations with confidence and constructive action. Finally, discover the power of coaching as a leadership skill to help team members in their growth and development.