MAKING DISSATISFACTION WORK FOR YOU: DMYTRO ANUFRIEV’S 5 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK

Feedback is an essential part of Recycling Solutions’ corporate culture, but it wasn’t always this. Our CEO Dmytro Anufriev talkes about how its introduction improved the company and shares a few secrets to making good use of this tool.

1. Know your goals.
Feedback can solve many problems for your company if used correctly. Two insights prompted me to introduce feedback culture in Recycling Solutions.
First, I felt uncomfortable providing feedback myself—not out of fear or unfamiliarity with the method, but because people could misinterpret it. I surmised that other people in the company had this problem, too. Therefore, we needed to create equal conditions in which everyone will feel comfortable about providing and receiving feedback.
Second, I noticed that people could be unhappy about something, which is a usual thing for any company. I wanted to convert as much as possible discontent in the kitchen, in the smoking room, or just within into a civilized conversation about what goes wrong and how we can improve it. I believe that feedback is the only tool that helps do it properly.
2. Change your perception.
The feedback system was hard to integrate, but it’s nothing unusual. Post-Soviet countries are severely lacking in the feedback culture department. Getting feedback, people think that they are being criticized and either start making excuses or recoil. Also, people hesitate to provide it for the same reasons.
Therefore, I created a mandatory exercise for everyone participating in the same meetings as I. We have exchanged feedback with 15–20 people on different levels. Half of them said they felt uncomfortable doing it and didn’t understand why do it in the first place. However, the feedback gathered proved extremely helpful for me, them, and the company in general.
3. Stick to the method.
I’m a huge proponent of the BOFF model because it’s simple, clean, and straightforward. It leaves little room for confusing things, messing up, or getting nervous. Therefore, it will be especially helpful at the early stages when in doubt or hesitating. Although somewhat mechanical, this method enables focused, clear, and quick feedback. Providing feedback, you need not get emotional. Think and watch what you say or write, not to hurt other people’s feelings. BOFF is perfect for that, and it’s for this reason that I recommend it.
4. Use what you hear.
During the first feedback exercise, I wrote four notepad pages worth of comments and suggestions. Some of those were about me personally, e.g., don’t check the smartphone during meetings and zone out when uninterested in the topic. Now I’m working on self-improvement. If I need to check the inbox during the meeting, I ask for a minute-long email break. This way, we all will get distracted once and then return to the meeting.
Other comments that I got were on the more general side of things, calling for company-wide change. For one, we found a few bottlenecks when it came to creating personal employee development plans, and we are trying to fix them now. Also, we saw that many things about training systems were misunderstood in our company. I have heard the people’s comments and suggestions and forwarded them to the HR department.
Feedback also enabled us to see the problems in functional interaction, including delays in primary documentation preparation and budgeting. The things like these are addressed on the organizational level, and we are tackling them already.
5. Understand the difference.
One of the most popular questions about feedback is what makes it different from what we get during meetings, strategy sessions, and status updates. There are at least three reasons why that isn’t enough.
First, many problems are overlooked. E.g., there are no all-hands meetings regarding the company training systems’ issues.
Second, we have limited time for meetings, so some things tend to fall through the cracks. They leave the meeting together with the person who wanted to discuss them and eat away at him or her, growing into discontent if unaddressed. Besides, it’s uncomfortable to provide feedback to people during all-hands meetings. And then, there is hardly any time for it after the meeting.
Third, it takes preparation to provide quality feedback. People not always can voice it during meetings, and sometimes it would be ill-advised to do. One needs to think over what they want to say beforehand.
Our next step was to implement regular feedback rituals on all level. This way, we can find and rectify problems that arise during the company’s operation. Feedback has already helped Recycling Solutions improve, this is what keeps up on the path of progress.