More Aspects of Culture

Candid feedback

Compliance, diversity, and inclusion are essential measures to organizations. When interpreted inaccurately, these metrics can negatively influence how people provide and perceive candid feedback. While afraid to sound offensive or unfriendly to others, many individuals often keep quiet even when it is crucial to speak.

For example, the following is a situation that I witnessed. A remote team member showcased newly developed functionality from his large computer monitor. When streamed to a smaller screen, the picture became so tiny that we could not see every UI element. Attendees could not understand whether the feature was following the original requirement. It was only a matter of asking the presenter to adjust the screen size, but nobody dared to do so out of trying to be polite and kind. Instead, the feature was accepted as-is by stakeholders. Later, those same attendees discovered several defects in earlier demonstrated capability because it turned out different than what it sounded like during the demo. This hesitation of providing immediate feedback delayed feature deployment to a production environment and added overhead of showcasing it again after a fix was implemented. I bet the company CEO would not want that to happen again because this episode was caused by a mere misunderstanding of the company’s compliance policies.

Therefore, encourage everybody to provide candid feedback when necessary; the earlier, the better. Educate people that this input must be treated as helpful advice to improve software quality and has nothing to do with how we treat each other.