Building a Feedback-Friendly Culture

Welcome back to "The Worthwhile Workplace" series, aimed at helping founders build thriving cultures that attract top talent and drive impact. This installation dives into the importance of normalizing candid feedback loops across all levels of your company.

In our last post, we explored how cultivating psychological safety allows founders to build values-driven teams that can truly thrive. But maintaining that open environment of curiosity and risk-taking requires another key ingredient: a strong culture of feedback.

Think about the last time you received candid feedback, positive or constructive. Did you feel appreciated and motivated to grow? Or did you feel attacked and defensive? The way an organization handles feedback can be profound: it transforms values from words on a website into tangible experiences that shape the company's culture and impact.

A feedback-friendly workplace is one where sharing opinions, surfacing concerns, and providing suggestions flows freely across all levels. It's an environment of mutual respect, where the intent is never personal criticism but continuous learning and improvement.

This open exchange of feedback delivers immense benefits:

Accelerated Learning & Growth

Through ongoing feedback loops, individuals and teams can rapidly identify blind spots, close skill gaps, and unleash their full potential. Use this input to tailor professional development plans that accelerate growth in key areas. An open culture helps maximize everyone's potential while creating an environment of psychological safety that empowers newer and more junior employees to provide candid feedback that can illuminate where the status quo might be holding you back.

Highly Aligned Teams

As your culture and your business goals evolve, frequent feedback helps ensure company priorities remain crystal clear across all levels. Tools like monthly town halls for Q&A or skip-level meetings gather invaluable ground-level perspectives, while candid communication ensures everyone remains tightly aligned on the mission, priorities, and areas to improve as the company scales.

Rapid Innovation

Innovation flourishes when assumptions are consistently challenged, and the most innovative ideas often come from the frontlines. A feedback culture empowers those closest to stakeholders and processes to speak up. Founders can crowdsource fresh ideas through initiatives like innovation contests and culture hackathons that incentivize employees to speak up. Hackathons also provide a forum to rapidly prototype and validate new concepts from across the company.

Engaged Employees

People want to feel heard and know their input matters. Feedback creates dialogue and fuels a sense of ownership in the mission, which in turn boosts business metrics. Companies in the top quartile of engagement have 23% higher profitability, 18% higher productivity, and 37% lower absenteeism (Gallup). Encourage candid input through innovative channels like external hotlines which provide more cover than typical "anonymous" surveys.

Despite the upsides, many founders struggle to embed a feedback culture from the start. Some common barriers we’ve seen include:

Discomfort with criticism

Criticism can sting, but founders who reframe it as an opportunity for growth create a culture of continuous improvement. One idea: Implement "Development Dimensions" — a practice where leaders openly share their own key areas for professional growth and development.

A "Development Dimension" could be a skill to improve, a blindspot to overcome, or a new area of knowledge to build. For example, a founder may share that they want to work on more actively listening in meetings instead of jumping to respond. By role modeling this openness about self-improvement areas, it sets the tone that feedback isn't criticism — it's an interpersonal communication tool that allows everyone to continuously grow. Bonus for founders who implement continuous feedback by building on strengths.

Power dynamics

When leaders are distant or unapproachable, people hesitate to provide upward feedback, so accessibility and transparency can go a long way toward minimizing hierarchical power dynamics. For example, at Shopify, accessibility and transparency in leadership are exemplified through regular Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions. These sessions invite employees at all levels to submit questions anonymously, ensuring everyone can voice their concerns without fear. Conducted live during town hall meetings, these AMAs feature a moderator who presents the top-voted questions directly to executives, who do not see the questions in advance. This approach democratizes communication and ensures that employee feedback directly reaches the leadership, fostering a culture of openness and trust.

Shopify’s AMA sessions serve as one example for building a transparent workplace. By actively engaging with employee feedback and questions, Shopify’s leadership breaks down hierarchical barriers, making themselves more approachable and responsive. This practice not only alleviates potential issues but also reinforces the company’s commitment to inclusive and participatory decision-making.

Recency bias

Recency bias is the tendency to weigh recent events more heavily than earlier events when making decisions or evaluations. This cognitive bias can cause people to overemphasize the importance of recent experiences, potentially skewing their perception and decision-making processes, and it can significantly influence how feedback is perceived and incorporated within an organization. A single negative experience with feedback can impact one’s openness in providing feedback going forward.

That's why founders must role model the right response — making a habit of genuinely thanking people for their candor, no matter how the feedback lands. This reinforces it as a positive behavior. Additionally, by consistently addressing feedback constructively and thoughtfully, leaders can mitigate the effects of recency bias, ensuring that one negative instance doesn't overshadow ongoing positive interactions. This consistent approach helps build a culture where feedback is not only accepted but actively encouraged as a means to drive personal and organizational growth.

In this dynamic, the emotional competence of founders is crucial, as their ability to manage emotions influences how effectively they can respond to feedback without bias, fostering a more balanced and resilient organizational culture.

To build a thriving feedback culture, founders must personally model and encourage the behaviors:

Be Hungry for Feedback

"What could we be doing better?" Ask this question often and mean it. Founders set the tone, so actively soliciting suggestions signals you truly value candid input. And whenever feedback is provided, express authentic appreciation — it builds trust that transparency is welcomed.

Praise in Public

Public recognition is powerful. Founders can amplify positive feedback in team meetings or on Slack channels. This visibility makes giving upward praise feel safe and appreciated, fueling more of the behavior you want to proliferate.

Discuss, Don't Defend

When receiving criticism, the instinct is to get defensive. However, modeling an open discussion devoid of judgment is crucial. Founders should listen intently, ask clarifying questions, and explore the feedback without getting mired in defensiveness or rationalizations.

Close the Loop

Circle back frequently on feedback received — share if/how suggestions were implemented and why. This accountability motivates continued openness by showing that constructive input tangibly impacts decisions. Left unanswered, people will stop wasting their breath.

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Creating a workplace where feedback flows freely is transformative for attracting top talent and enabling teams to rapidly grow and adapt, and it allows founders to truly embody and live the core values that are so essential for sustained impact.

Keep tuning into our “Worthwhile Workplace” series. In our next post, we'll look at some of the most progressive practices for building what's been called a "radically candid" organization that can maintain startup energy at scale.

And as always, we're here to help if you want to see what this would look like for your team. We specialize in crafting purpose-driven cultures from the ground up. Let's chat without any obligations and discover how we can assist you in shaping a workplace where both your team and your company thrive.