By Tony
Deblauwe
One of the most powerful methods of personal development is feedback. Feedback
about behavior, work performance, ideas, or specific skills, provides valuable insight
into your thinking, judgments and actions. Feedback is a common tool at work. Both
managers and employees seek feedback on a variety of projects and programs to
ensure the right decisions are made.
Problems can
occur, however, when the feedback is developmental. When the shift is made from
the abstract (e.g. strategy, vision, work process, etc.) to a person, people
may not be as honest for fear of hurting the person’s feelings or creating
conflict.
Assessment
tools like 360 reviews exist to help deliver feedback anonymously but the
process can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and unreliable. Anonymous feedback
is a vital tool in building a holistic view of how others perceive you.
Luckily, collecting anonymous feedback just got easier thanks to BetterMe.com.
BetterMe.com, run by CEO Sterling Mace, provides a fast and simple way to ask,
get, and give private anonymous feedback online. Not a multi-layered assessment
tool, BetterMe allows you to get feedback on anything you choose be it work or
personal related. It’s as easy as sending email. Here’s how it works:
Giving
Feedback:
* Write the feedback, enter an email, and send it
* Recipient gets an email with a link to your feedback
* The recipient reads the feedback and rates its usefulness
Getting Feedback:
* Send the feedback request form to people
* Recipients get an email with a link to the feedback form
* Recipient provides feedback, submits it, and you see the results
You can’t get easier than that! BetterMe has a dashboard that shows the feedback
you’ve sent and received. The data allows you to see trends that can help you
develop an action plan to improve your communication, presentation skills,
collaboration – just about any area you want input from others on. After
spending some time in the tool, I found the experience was great and several
people I used to capture sample feedback data also commented on the ease of use
of the interface.
Depending on the research you find, feedback, given properly, can improve
performance by 39%. That means feedback is an essential component for everyone
to reach optimal personal and professional performance. Thanks to BetterMe, now
it’s very straightforward and easy to get the data you need when you need it.
