March is the annual reviews season at Woven by Toyota and this year it brings an important change that employees have asked for and brought to the company through our Union. Starting this round, all employees will be asked to provide feedback to their direct managers and offer their managers suggestions on how to improve, or what works and what doesn’t in their work.
When we formed our organization, one of the ways to improve the company we could see was giving the employees with a path to communicate feedback upwards through the management chain. To make it possible, we have requested Woven by Toyota’s management to provide every employee a path to share their thoughts with their management and leadership, specifically by making it mandatory for managers to ask all their direct reports for annual performance review feedback.
How did the reviews work before this change?
Previously, every employee, both individual contributors and managers, would choose a group of peers from across the company to provide them feedback. Managers were recommended to include some of their direct reports of their choosing in this group, but did not have to include every one or any of them.
Why changing this was important?
While a manager has a significant influence on their reports’ working conditions and their experience at Woven by Toyota, not providing every report with a guaranteed path to record their thoughts and feedback towards their managers meant that managers did not have a high enough level of accountability in how they work with every report in a fair, unbiased and inclusive manner. Unconscious bias or unresolved conflicts would sometimes lead to some employees being rarely or never asked for feedback by their managers, making their opinions and ideas not heard or overlooked.
What improvements do we hope to see?
We hope that by reducing the risks of unconscious bias influencing the selection of peers for the annual review process, managers will start receiving a more well-rounded set of constructive and actionable feedback that would help them become better leaders, find opportunities for improvement, and surface potentially unknown issues or hidden conflicts that they may have with their reports, ultimately leading to the issues being solved, making Woven by Toyota a better place to work and enabling us to deliver better products to our customers faster and more efficiently.
Woven Union is happy to see Woven by Toyota’s management taking our thoughts and feedback into consideration, and we are inviting the company to continue building a collaborative working process between the Union and the management to improve our company together.
Finally, we are inviting all Woven by Toyota employees to reach out to us, ask questions and join Woven Union!