Giving Feedback

Needs Analysis & Design Document

In this project, the client is the customer service department for a fictional technology company.  The project manager indicated a desire to build a new peer-mentorship program that will support their new customer service representatives.  As part of the needs analysis, the new mentors indicated a level of discomfort with the idea of providing feedback to their peers. 

When proposing a solution for this need, I considered how best to support these CSRs long-term. Giving feedback to a peer is the type of skill that many learners will be reluctant to practice without encouragement due to the awkward social situations inherent in that type of interaction.  As a result, I recommended both a vILT session where particpants would actively practice giving feedback to their peers and an ongoing coaching program whereby the new mentors would practice giving feedback to established managers in the department based on prerecorded calls the department recieved. The combination of low-stakes practice during instruction and spaced repetition in the months following training should lessen the confidence gap often experienced by new leaders.

Course Organization

This course begins by establishing the important role that feedback plays when growing a team. I started here to establish why the skills in the course will be useful to the learners. Because I include an activity where the learners share a time that feedback impacted them, I also encourage them to view the skill as an opportunity to improve their co-workers' experiences - not just help the company meet what they may view as an arbitrary goal. 

Once the introduction is complete, learners are introduced to four broad categories of feedback. In this section, the facilitator is encouraged to engage to solicit examples of each category from the learners. Because most learners are already familiar with the concepts of positive, negative, and constructive feedback, including this content early on encourages a sense of familiarity and confidence. The decision to have this be a series of short, informal interactions (as opposed to the more intricate interactions later in the course), reinforces these feelings.This mindset is key, given that one of the driving forces behind the course is that the learners do not feel comfortable giving formal feedback to others.  

The third section of the course focuses on providing the learners with three frameworks for giving feedback to peers. I begin with a technique many people are already familiar with - the "compliment sandwich" - to bridge the feeling of confidence from the prior section. Following the sandwich framework are two techniques that may be more unfamiliar to the learner. After each framework is introduced, learners are encouraged to practice using it in the chat. This allows them to get quick feedback from the instructor before proceeding to a one-on-one practice session with another participant.