Collect Feedback on Work Processes

Collecting feedback on work processes is an intentional practice demonstrating an organization’s values related to how it wants to do its work. It provides a structure to measure success criteria related to organizational practices and process goals, and it allows staff to make adjustments to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive in their work.

USE THIS IN ORDER TO…

  • Look for and make visible possible inequities around the ways in which people work in your organization.

  • Create and use a protocol to evaluate and generate feedback on internal work processes.


KEY COMPONENTS

  1. Craft a values statement (if one doesn’t already exist) about how your organization does its work, using an inclusive process that seeks input from across the organization.

  2. Consider whether each project or individual work team will establish its own process-related success criteria or if organization-wide criteria will be used instead.

  3. Create expectations for collecting process-centered feedback by building it into project management task lists, manager-employee check-ins, and other organizational structures.

  4. Examine ways that information about work processes is currently uncovered and understood by people of diverse social identities. The protocol or feedback structure may be simple or more complex.


CONSIDERATIONS FOR REMOTE IMPLEMENTATION

  1. Identify and mitigate biases that are exacerbated in remote work, such as distance and recency bias, which may lead to assumptions and affect perceptions. Ask questions and seek to understand, rather than making conclusions around a colleague’s situation.

  2. Encourage all participants to be on video to be able to observe non-verbal cues during the meeting.

  3. Be mindful of the remote work context as the organization looks at all the ways that the work takes place – including how convenings are organized/facilitated, what gets communicated, and when work happens.


ARTIFACTS & RESOURCES

“Since processes can oftentimes perpetuate the dominant voice and/or authority figure, it is important to continually collect feedback from all stakeholders to maintain an inclusive working environment."

– Mary Rice-Boothe, NYCLA