What People Prefer

When you ask team members how the team is doing, their feedback shines a light on what is good and bad about how the team works together. This helps you see more clearly how you can make the team work best for the people who are part of it.

We talked to individuals with disabilities, their families and service providers in Edmonton about how they like to give feedback. Here are some tips for how to get feedback.

• Ask questions so that people have to give comments-not just say "yes" or "no" or "it was good."
• Ask simple questions that people understand.
• A phone call is better than a form. It is more personal and forms get lost.
• If you use a form, keep it short-no more than 20 questions or one page.
• Do not ask "yes" or "no" questions. They do not tell you what happened.
• Do not use rating scales much. These are the questions that ask you to mark a number, often from 1 to 5, about how good something was. Many people make mistakes with this kind of question. And the answers you get do not tell you how to fix problems or what you did right.
• Call and ask how the work for the team is going.
• If you think there may be problems, have another person call for feedback between meetings. People need to feel safe about giving feedback.
• Give a short report about the feedback at the start of the next meeting. Say what you will do to help the team-work go better. This tells people you listened to what they said [D6].

People said that there are two good ways to ask if the team works together well:

• at the end of meetings
• in a phone call between meetings.

At the end of meetings, ask each team member to tell you

• What did we do well?
• What do we need to be better at? How can we do better?

Keep it short and simple. At the end of a meeting, people are tired and want to go. These questions give you useful information. They also let people talk about problems without saying whose fault it is, so people's feelings will not get hurt [D2].

People said it is good to have a person who is not a team member call them between meetings to get feedback. In this way, they can say what they think without anyone on the team knowing who said it. They can feel safe if they need to say they are unhappy with how you did something. The person who calls must tell you what people said but not who said it. If a team member has said something that you may not like to hear, the person who tells you this must help you not to be too upset, but to listen carefully.