Turning Feedback Frustration into Team Growth

Feedback is hard. There’s a constant balance between trying to help them level up and trying to make sure that work gets out the door in a timely manner. Yes, we want to help our team level up, but we also have deadlines to hit and reports to deliver. How many times do you check someone’s work and send it back to them versus just fixing it yourself? 

It’s not like it’s easy to explain what went wrong or why that move isn’t right or how to fix it. It’s hard to close circles or get a good idea of open issues as a manager. Why is work stalling out? What issues are cropping up? That pain is only compounded by quotas and project timelines. 

We have to find and leverage creative approaches that help us hold both the important (growing our team and processes) and the urgent (deadlines and deliverables) in tension. These are three ways your team can keep growing effectively while still delivering to your standards. 

As an important note: Oftentimes, feedback is solely associated with new hires. However, this pain is not just tied to training up new staff. It’s also something we have to work through with subcontractors, when performing work in new areas, when coordinating with teams, and pretty much any time we’re working with one or more people. These tactics aren’t just for training, they’re ways to level up our entire team, expert and amateur, by building systems of feedback that help staff grow. 

Good Communication

It seems obvious, but it’s so important that it bears stating anyway: we need to make sure we’re communicating well. What that actually looks like—what channels we use, what resources are available, etc— should be different based on the team. 

Remote teams will need different approaches than in-person ones. Visual learners should be shown, not just told, when their engineering move creates a safety issue. Some people will need to see the bigger picture of a build, while others will want a deep dive into the ins and outs of regulations and safety compliance. 

This doesn’t mean to wait until someone has perfect textbook knowledge before having them look at a pole. It means creating the space to ask questions, give answers, look over shoulders, and shadow. 

If you’ve ever had to hunt people down just to close a loop, you know that effective communication is efficient communication. This may mean hitting pause on the email chains and screenshots and actually getting in the same room (or at least on a video call) together. Yes, it takes time, but sending eleven emails back and forth to get on the same page takes a lot more time.

Visibility into Work 

It’s hard to visualize and resolve an attachment issue or safety violation or design issue when someone’s explaining it to you at the water cooler. Providing feedback and touchpoints directly tied to the thing we’re working on is far more effective. Feedback dialogues should point to specific actions and changes. It’s so much easier to discuss problems when we’re both looking at the problem and using the same platform. 

(It also helps teammates get things done and keep track of to-dos. Instead of having to find every sticky note, email, chat message, and remember passing conversations, staff know exactly where to look for their task list.) 

We’ve also found that the attribute history in Katapult Pro is helpful for this as well. With attribute history, all changes and edits are stored and can’t be changed. If someone’s edit has created a problem down the road, teammates can see those edits and comment on them to get a better understanding of why that change was made and provide feedback. 

Growth Goals 

No matter the level of experience, creating metrics and goals helps keep teams growing and performing to a higher standard. The shape of those goals will vary based on the staff: new employees may have goals to design a small number of poles a week correctly, while the old guard might be focused on volume. Having a trajectory that’s spelled out and trackable helps ensure that the important vs. urgent tension slowly levels out over time. 

Action tracking in Katapult Pro was created to help managers and team leads track things like user actions, time stamps, and job changes and tie them to workflows for staff development, feedback, proficiency, and project health. 

By looking at steps within the engineering workflow and user actions across those steps, you can assess a team member’s growth and create new metrics for success. 

Katapult Pro wasn’t just designed to make the engineering process safer and easier—it’s designed to make it better, and make team members better. Be on the lookout for more info about our feedback features, or reach out to our team today to learn more! https://www.katapultengineering.com/get-started