How we created an effective, game-based team feedback framework

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TL;DR: How we improvised and created our own full-fledged team feedback framework and made it fun with a game for progress evaluation. This framework is an internal tool to improve the team collaboration and does not relate to our approach at performance evaluation.

Every team is a complex of people whose interactions, communication and collaboration defines the growth, performance and the success of the team and every individual. This complex often entails diversity in mindset, viewpoints, age, gender, personality and chemistry among people. This diversity is vital when creative thinking is necessary, as it increases collective intelligence, but is also challenging when it comes to interactions among its members. And interaction is everything in a team, in order to ensure a harmonic and productive coexistence, in which everyone is happy and motivated. Team members need to openly communicate and try together to find solutions. This is why concrete and constructive feedback from everyone to everyone is a key element to overcome the difficulties and foster good collaboration and why every team should find a fitting context to apply it.

I am a Data Scientist at commercetools and 1.5 years ago I took over a coaching side role. As a people coach, I support colleagues in my technical domain — and consequently my team — with their career goals, personal development and workplace happiness. This role gives me space to bring up and implement ideas for improved collaboration.

My team has been relatively stable over time and therefore presents many perks and challenges that come along with a long-term relationship. Just like any tech team today, we regularly provide and receive snippets of feedback through our meetings, Slack chat, PR reviews and agile retrospectives. However this feedback is often implicit, tailored to a case or incident and sometimes too vague and subtle. Every team member might have a vague idea on where to improve but it is not always concretely communicated. And it isn’t only about areas to improve, but also positive feedback that gets lost in the daily routine. Under time and work pressure, it is easy to focus on flaws and things that need to be fixed, rather than acknowledging the effort and good work that went into making results happen. So this stream of feedback is not enough and it is quite prone to misinterpretation.

Thus, roughly a year ago, we started experimenting with a more proper and direct feedback framework where team members could give one another constructive, detailed feedback on both areas they do particularly well and where to improve. It is like 360-degree feedback, but only within the team and conducted via regular feedback rounds and a progress evaluation game.

As this started from scratch, there were many questions to answer in order to find the best fitting approach regarding whether it should be in-person, online, anonymous etc. After an iterative process of gathering each team member’s preferences while offering flexibility, I ended up with a Google Form consisting of two very straightforward questions.

The feedback questionnaire template we used

I replicated the form for each participant who wanted feedback and invited the rest team members to participate anonymously — participation was optional but highly encouraged. I did one for myself too and transferred the ownership of that form to a fellow colleague.

The participants preferred to receive final responses exactly as they were written (instead of being summarized), which I also found better to avoid the risk of misinterpreting someone else’s words. Before we started, I also sent an informational email to highlight points like how this asynchronous form doesn’t leave space for clarification from the recipient’s end, so they need to be clear and use examples when possible. In the end I collected all the responses, rearranged the order, grouped similar topics together and handed them to each recipient.

The outcome was helpful and motivating. Most team members participated, gave constructive feedback for improvements in a friendly and respectful manner and acknowledged the good work generously. It is hard to objectively say whether the collaboration improved significantly after this, but it did improve and I felt that people were overall more conscious regarding their “weaknesses”. Half a year later we repeated the process and, in the end, every member participated in at least one round — most of us in both rounds.

The feedback-on-the-feedback game

Through the two feedback rounds, we all received some explicit recommendations on how to grow ourselves and improve the team work. But did we improve? Did we try? That part was not as clear and the whole process seemed somehow incomplete. And to complete it, we would need a more transparent approach. Up till now, feedback was anonymously given, but everyone would have to reveal it in order to get a feel from the entire team on whether they’re improving.

That might cause some discomfort but it would only make sense and be fair if everyone was involved. Therefore I wanted something different, more pleasant than anonymous forms and perhaps even playful, so I tried to gamify it. This way it would feel less like a formal evaluation and more like a fun setting to communicate and discover more about ourselves and our interactions.

I planned a meeting, explained in brief what it is about and asked everyone to pick 1–3 points of advice they received and for which they want to check the progress with the rest. To make things easier, I printed out the feedback and asked them to cut the respective snippets and bring them along. That was all they had to prepare before joining the meeting. The rest game was carried out with the help of a whiteboard, four printed memes and one magnet and blank piece of paper for each person. The memes were not necessary but provided casual and humorous context.

Here’s how you can replicate what we did.

The setting:

On the whiteboard, draw two distinct areas: the points table and the response board. On the points table, write the names of the participants and prepare 6 columns for the points. On the response board, designate 4 small boxes or distinct subareas for the magnets and try to make clear what each represents and how many points it earns. Use memes to reflect the emotion of the response — and for fun — if you wish. Last, leave the magnets on the side for the voting part.

On the table, prepare one blank piece of paper (and pen) for every participant. If possible, a small box would be handy but not necessary. Also, if you want to play with random order, prepare for it, e.g. write down in small paper lanes all the names to draw randomly one name every time. And don’t forget to put some sweets and snacks too!

Illustration of the game in the whiteboard

The rules:

Secret vote: At the very beginning of the game, every player takes the blank paper note and writes down secretly the name of the person he/she thinks has showed the most improvement since feedback rounds started, then folds it and puts it in a box or along with the other secret votes. Note: you vote who you think has improved the most, not who you think will win. This will be saved for the end and will count as bonus points. Proceed with the rounds.

The rounds: The main game consists of 3 rounds. Each has the same process but there are some variations in the points. In every round, with random order, every player is reading out loud one feedback snippet they received and asks the rest team members whether they improved on that. The rest will have to put a magnet on the response board area that reflects best their opinion among the given choices:

• You nailed it! -> You clearly improved [+2points]
• Not bad! -> I saw some progress but you can do better [+1 point]
• It wasn’t a problem -> I never saw this as a problem [+1 point]
• Oops… -> I didn’t see progress, try harder [-1 point]

The votes on the response board define how many points each player will collect for the round. If, for example, there were 2 votes on “you nailed it” and 3 votes on “not bad” then the sum of points for that player and this round is 7.

Every player must participate in the 1st round and can pass in the next ones, which means he/she doesn’t then read personal feedback and doesn’t collect points anymore but must still vote for the other players.

The 3 rounds differ on how the points will be counted:

• Round A: the sum of the points for this round exactly as given and explained above
• Round B: the sum of points of the round plus 1 more point for the bravery of continuing to another round
• Round C: the sum points as given but, before playing, you have the right to brash off a not so good score from a previous round. The average of the rounds will be then counted only based on your left scores and so this is a chance for you to improve it. But remember: you have to decide this before proceeding with the round.

Note that all team members decide together upfront whether the voting should be open or secret and only if everyone is comfortable with open voting, then you can go with that.

After the end of the 3 rounds, you calculate the average and put it in a separate column and it is time now to reveal the secret votes. These will be 1 bonus point for every secret vote a player received. In the end the final score would be:

Average points of rounds (exc. brushed off round) + Secret points.

And tada, that’s our feedback on the feedback game!

There were two reasons why I came up with these variations in the rounds. First, the idea was to incentivise playing multiple rounds. Feedback and communication is the ultimate goal, so improvement shouldn’t be the only rewarding action but also the eagerness to open up and ask for as much feedback as possible. Secondly, it’s a game so I tried to make it interesting with a chance for a turnaround and some space for strategy. And of course you can consider to modify or enhance it. Other alternatives I thought of, for example, was instead of brushing off your own points, to challenge another person to exchange points if you think you would end up with a higher score.

How the feedback game turned out

I was anxious how this game would turn out and it was a great surprise to see it evolving into something much better and helpful than even I expected. We played it with full disclosure voting and everyone was motivated and participated until the end. Furthermore, it ended up in very constructive and friendly conversation with little attention to the game and points. For every feedback advice we discussed extensively, gave opinions, openly this time, and brought up lots of concrete examples. We asked questions, we answered questions. And all this in a very friendly and laughing atmosphere. And we had a winner, who got some candy as a reward, which he later shared with everyone.

Because of the extensive conversation, even within 1.5 hours, we didn’t make it to the 3rd round, my favourite one. And since everyone planned to play in every round, the +1 point of the second round turned out a little pointless in our case. So, in a future repetition, I’ll make sure to allocate more time with a break or modify and adjust the number of rounds and their special rules.

Overall everyone enjoyed it and it turned out to be very entertaining but, most importantly, very useful and enlightening, with concrete advice to consider and a much clearer picture of how our behaviour and work is perceived by the rest of the team members.

Final thoughts

If you’re interested to integrate a feedback framework in your team’s processes or to enhance an existing one, I highly recommend giving ours a try. Use it as is or be creative and customize your own version. Don’t spend too long looking for special feedback tools, it is easy to implement. And don’t wait for management or HR to bring you one because it’s not a meant to evaluate your colleagues’ performance. It is something to apply if you want to improve communication and collaboration in your team, and do so in a pleasant way that will help building a better ground for effective collaboration.

And if you do try it out, please share your experiences and possible variations here, I’ll be looking forward to hearing them!

*Thanks to my team for being so open to experiments for a better collaboration and to our agile coach for helping me out with the backstage preparation and some helpful tips.