Something I wanted to get off my chest past month, this morning had the inspiration or let's say in the "mood" to write this.
We deal with quite a number of principal vendors from RPA, office automation, ERP and enterprise content management.
One of these vendors specifically Microsoft practices feedback - which encourages feedback from us as partners on engagement they do... be it a specific event or even one to one sessions. It's almost like an automated trigger to solicit feedback from the partner or one might say "customer".
Personally, I think it's a good practice to ask the question "How did we do ? What can we do better next time ? How can we do things better ?". Yes do doubt it can be uncomfortable reading sometimes but then again it's a reality check you can say as to what other people apart from you sees things.
In fact using Office 365 one can easily do this using MS Forms to come up with a professional and great looking feedback forms which is mobile ready as well. It then summarizes the response into statistics for you to take stock of your effort.
I used this internally for my company to ask our staff "How are we doing as management ?" . It can be surprising on some of the feedback, which should be viewed positively especially on adverse feedback. Instead of reacting it's good to reflect and even take that feedback to improve.
Now to the question I put on the title above, "Feedback or Not To Feedback ?"... there is also the other side of the coin when you provide feedback especially not so nice ones. There were 2 instance , when I decided to try this and it had an adverse reaction. Both instance ended up the engagement became unhealthy and not got what I want from giving that feedback.
Perhaps I should have tapered my feedback with what they did well and then provide them with what did not go well.
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
At the end of the day the intention of feedback to get a much better experience from the next engagement, so if fails then the intention of your feedback fails.
Dale Carnegie in his book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" has a case study of how would one phrase a letter of complaint, recalling that perhaps I should have provided that feedback with positive tone with the intention to achieve my objective of getting better experience.
What is your experience of feedback ? Should be waste time by taking that extra "care" or just be brutally honest. Like to hear from you.
If you are interested in knowing more about how to maximize the use Office 365, especially for MS Form, there are further resources below.