Feedback Loops for Continuous Improvement in Scaling Businesses

Written By
Assured Strategy Coach Ted Sarvata

Continuous improvement is a lot less complicated than you’ve been led to believe. And yet, how do you even know where to begin? What needs to be improved? Company leaders may be the least qualified people in the company to know the answer to that question. You used to be an expert, back when you were doing the work. And that’s the key point we must highlight. The experts are the people doing the work. They know what’s working and what’s not. They know where the company is wasting money, time, and effort. The key to continuous improvement is feedback from those experts.

Let’s define feedback. Feedback is simply input. If someone tells me I was rude to them, that’s feedback. Was I being rude? For the purposes of understanding feedback, it doesn’t matter if I was or not. It’s just feedback. It’s their opinion. If someone thanks me for my contribution to the success of a project, that’s feedback too. I don’t have to agree with it. I don’t have to refute it. It’s simply a piece of data.

At Assured Strategy, we talk about everyone walking around with an imaginary feedback bag. When someone gives me feedback, I say, “Thank you,” and put that feedback into the bag. I don’t have to react to the feedback at the moment. I put it in the bag and simply hold on to it to see if I get similar feedback from other sources. If not, then that piece of feedback was simply a one-off and I can safely do nothing about it. Doing nothing is great because that frees up my time to take action on the feedback that does get repeated, showing me the mountain issues, not the molehills. None of us has time to waste on molehill issues.

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Now, let’s take the feedback bag idea and turn it into a system for your company to solicit, process, and potentially act on feedback. You’ll want to create 2 separate feedback logs, one for employee feedback and one for customer feedback. We’ve covered in other blog posts, the processes for collecting feedback, Start, Stop, Keep for employees, and 4Q conversations for customers. Please reach out if you need help on these. <email address here> These logs don’t have to be complicated. A simple Excel or Google spreadsheet is a great way to start.

The key to making this work is the establishment of a feedback loop (we can send you this loop as a flowchart, if you like). At your weekly executive meeting, spend 10 minutes reading the new items on the feedback log, one by one.

For each, you have 3 choices:

1. Do nothing. This is for items where we don’t know yet if it is a molehill or a mountain issue.
2. Assign an action, what we call the Who, What, When (WWW). This is for small items that can simply be solved with quick action. For example, the downstairs restroom garbage bin is often overflowing. Someone can run to the hardware store to get a bigger bin.
3. Move to our list of topics for future discussion, what we call RIOS: Rocks, Issues, Opportunities or Stucks. (please reference our blog posts for further explanation or contact us directly). This is for items that need further conversation. They might be mountain issues. You may have noticed a pattern in the feedback.

Do not have any conversation while reviewing the log. You simply read the feedback item, ask any brief clarifying questions needed, and then choose one of these 3 paths, and move on.

For each of these 3 choices, there is an important next step: closing the loop. Someone needs to be assigned to contact the person who gave the feedback and let them know that the item was reviewed by the executive team and what the outcome was. If you skip this step, your sources of feedback will dry up, as people will rightly assume that no one is paying attention to their feedback. Note that telling them that the executive team has reviewed their feedback and is doing nothing currently is very different from not letting them know anything at all. If you teach them that feedback is feedback, they will continue to provide their thoughts and opinions, even if you don’t act on everything they submit.

In summary:

• Customer and employee feedback is critical as they are the experts.
• Don’t overreact to feedback.
• Once you see a pattern, spend time solving mountain, not molehill, issues.
• Always close the loop with the feedback source.