Recently we asked our teams at maber some very simple IT-related questions:
- What do you like (and not like) about how we communicate now – and why?
- How do you find sharing documents and collaborating day to day?
- What small tech frustrations have you learned to live with but never raised?
We posed those questions… and then we left the room.
Why leave the room? Why ask questions and then not stay to hear the answers? Of course we wanted to hear those answers but we didn’t want to, as my colleague Eathan very astutely put it, “poison the well.” We didn’t want to influence the conversation simply by being present. If we’d stayed, we risked hearing the usual reassuring lines:
“Everything’s fine, you’re doing a great job… there’s this one small thing, but otherwise it’s all great!”
Comforting? Yes. Useful? Kind Of…
What we needed were the details and the patterns. A bit like the old line “look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.” It’s easy as an IT team to focus on the big Apps and tools, but what about the little things… the minutiae, the slow death by a thousand cuts issues? It’s those that chip away at our end users’ happiness and productivity every day. And it’s those we really wanted to get visibility of here.
So what did we get back?
In short: honest, useful, actionable feedback. Exactly what we were hoping for.
To put a figure on it we got over 70 separate points to review with information about how people actually use the tools we’ve implemented. Not just, “yeah, it’s fine,” but real pain points that we can now map and track across the business.
- Some issues we already knew about.
- Some were completely new.
- Others weren’t new at all but we had no idea how widespread or frustrating they had become.
At one point I caught myself saying,
“And you’ve sat on this for how long?! Why haven’t you raised a ticket?”
A completely natural reaction from an IT manager and in this instance, a completely wrong one.
Because the whole point of this exercise was to promote open and honest discussion in an environment that will suit more people. At maber, raising a ticket isn’t like logging an issue with a faceless support team. We’re colleagues. Friends. Familiar faces. And that changes the dynamic. Some will be comfortable with that, and others will not.
And the Bonus Prize?
This was my favourite part of the whole exercise and completely unexpected. Some teams chose to share recordings of their sessions with us. Watching them back, we noticed something brilliant:
People weren’t just raising issues, they were solving them for each other in real time.
Someone would say, “I’m struggling with…” And another would immediately reply, “Oh have you tried….” It became a kind of live, peer-to-peer IT support group, totally organic and genuinely heartening to watch.
And the lessons?
As much for myself as for anyone reading, here’s what I’m taking away from this:
- If you want honest feedback…give people the spaces that work for them. Not everyone is comfortable giving feedback through the channels you want them to.
- If you want actionable feedback…create space for people to talk to each other, not just to you. Because no matter the sector; IT, architecture, design or anything else, if you create the right space, and you’re prepared to listen, people will tell you exactly what you need to do and probably, exactly how to do it!