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Ask HN: Micro-feedback at work and cultural differences
My team is building Karmabot.chat, a tool for gathering micro-feedback on chats.
The bot works on Slack, MS Teams and Telegram and tracks in-chat team performance ('karma', very similar to Reddit concept) via simple set of commands:
`@user ++ for fixing that annoying bug`
and, for example
`@user 2-- for showing up late AGAIN`
I've been living in New Zealand for 12 years, spent some time in Australia, dealt with Australian customers, worked remotely with the US-based teams. Naturally, as an immigrant, I have somewhat limited understanding of the western work ethics customs.
As they say at Startup School, 'keep it simple', hence one of the features in question is the _concept of negative karma_.
So, my question to the friendly community: is it OK to use negative karma as a measurement tool for professional accountability?
Consider the following scenario, say, you've:
- missed an important meeting,
- actively avoiding daily standups,
- broken company's website,
- did not show up for work,
- constantly ignoring your colleagues requests, etc
Would you please share your views and possibly answer the following questions:
- As a manager, would you feel comfortable reducing your employees karma (@user--)?
- As an employee, how would you feel getting hit with negative karma request?
Please note your current location in your response.
Thanks so much . It's super hard to build a product that people actually want to use.
Link to the product: https://karmabot.chat
P.S.: From what we've leant so far, negative micro-feedback is acceptable in SOME cultures. The way it is now, downvoting is optional. It is OFF by default. 3700+ teams from 50+ countries use Karmabot in various ways. Some of US, most of Indian, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and generally Eastern European teams are fine with --. New Zealand and Australia -- is a loud and clear NO
- karmabot 8y agoDec 1 Karmabot stats. Karmabot Slack: - 1,270 (0%) teams - Tracking hyper-active users (gave/received karma in the last 30 days): 2,065 (-17%) - Average new teams per month: 104 (-1%) Karmabot MS: - 2,334 (+2%) teams, 21466 users (+2%) - Custom categories feature is in development. Must launch this week. Karmabot Telegram: - 152 teams (+1%)
- stevenwliao 8y ago"Broke the company website" is a process problem, not a people problem.
- kulesh 8y agoI agree. I pulled those lines from the teams that use the negative karma feature.
- stevenwliao 8y agoUS dev: I prefer when areas of improvement are discussed privately- it's helped me grow at estimation, setting expectations, and honing my quality/shipit slider. I'm sympathetic to collecting more metrics for measuring performance because it can reduce bias. Perhaps a good compromise would be making the karma count only visible by the individual employee and the manager.
- kulesh 8y agoThanks. We've got easy-to-fine-tune visibility and notifications settings. In most cases, the teams that use negative karma send these requests privately. I presume it's mainly for tracking things for performance reviews later. One client confirmed such use case, gathering data. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts.