Providing and receiving feedback is a key part of the Apotti organizational culture and competence development. Apotti started their cooperation with Humbol when they wanted to improve their feedback culture.
Feedback is given in many different circumstances
Feedback can be given and received in many different situations. For example, feedback can be received from a colleague after a successful project, directly from your manager, or as part of a broader feedback discussion, where you take a moment to analyze and learn from the feedback. Apotti’s goal is to make the broader feedback discussion easier and more systematic as a process and at the same time more meaningful.
How to ensure that giving and receiving feedback is as easy as possible?
The challenge for Apotti was to collect enough feedback and to allocate it correctly. In an agile operating model, managers can be responsible for several self-organizing teams and do not always have the responsibility to lead the actual work or project. In these situations, giving feedback on a team member’s performance can be challenging. This can be resolved by holding recurring feedback discussions with the team member, for which feedback on the team member’s performance is collected from colleagues. The role of the manager in the feedback discussion is to discuss the provided feedback together with the team member and to provide coaching.
Giving and collecting feedback was often a time-consuming and laborious process for the manager. Feedback was collected via email or chat and the discussion was booked in Outlook. If necessary, materials for the discussion were summarized in Excel or PowerPoint. Sometimes it took several hours of valuable working time to organize a single feedback discussion. At worst, valuable feedback was not received.
The aim of the Humbol and Apotti cooperation was to create a practice that generates as many meaningful feedback discussions as possible. This required that the feedback process should be as easy and effortless as possible for all parties involved. Nowadays, an Apotti employee can choose from Humbol any time when he or she wants to have a feedback discussion and from whom he or she wants to receive feedback. The Humbol application then automatically creates calendar invitations for the discussion, sends feedback requests to relevant colleagues or customers, and guides the manager and team member to prepare for the discussion. For the feedback discussion, Humbol automatically aggregates the feedback for review. The aggregated summary can be used to have a meaningful discussion and to agree on possible development areas.
“Every one of our experts deserves feedback on their work and the opportunity to develop. Now our experts can effortlessly ask their colleagues for feedback and also assess their performance themselves. Humbol enables you to identify successes and development areas in a better way and from a broader perspective than before. Collegiate feedback has been received with gratitude in our teams,” says Jenni Partanen, HR Manager at Apotti.
A day-to-day tool for the manager
The new practice and the tool have been well received by managers because they save a considerable amount of time and can focus on coaching instead of on collecting feedback:
“Until now, most of the manager’s tools have been such that they need to be served. This is one of the first tools that does work on my behalf,” says Jarkko Hansen, Team Leader at Apotti.
Feedback enables more meaningful discussions
Feedback from colleagues brings new perspectives to the discussions with your manager. Ulla Ahonen, Product Owner at Apotti tells of her own experiences using Humbol:
“For a long time, I have longed for a clear and easy way to ask for feedback from my colleagues. Through Humbol, my colleagues give me very perceptive and well-reasoned feedback, and also highlighted good areas for development.
The structure of Humbol’s feedback discussion guided my thinking, and the discussion with my manager proceeded naturally from one theme to another. Feedback and comments from others brought an even broader perspective to the discussion and brought additional perspectives that I would not have thought of myself.
Giving feedback with Humbol was also easy and smooth because the structure was clear and functional. In my opinion, the tool also challenges feedback providers to formulate their comments in an appreciative and constructive way.”
The Apotti system is the first in the world to combine health and social services data into the same environment. The common system enables social services and health care to be measured, developed, and managed as a single entity – which helps to optimize costs. With recent implementations, Apotti’s system is used by 45,000 health and social services professionals and more than half a million individuals today. More information about Apotti: https://www.apotti.fi/.
Humbol is a software tool for systematic employee experience development that helps teams and employees gather feedback and have more meaningful discussions. The Humbol service makes companies’ leadership practices more proactive, systematic and equal by bringing feedback and meaningful discussions into an integral part of the company’s operations. More information about Humbol: https://www.humbol.app/.