About Kilimo

Kilimo is an Argentine startup that was born six years ago with the purpose of promoting the efficient use of water in food production. To achieve this goal, they developed software that analyzes climatic factors, agricultural data and satellite images to generate information about when and how much to water food. In addition, it has clients in several countries in America such as: Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru and Mexico.

Today, they have a team of 33 specialists divided in Argentina and Chile. The dissemination and maintenance of culture at Kilimo is a very important topic for the organization. Therefore, they have a person who is fully responsible for this topic within the company.

How was the pre-Qulture.Rocks era?

Before starting the partnership with Qulture.Rocks, Kilimo performed the feedback process only in semiannual periods when assessing the performance of employees. Due to these long periods between feedback, employees sometimes felt disoriented as to what they should improve and work for in the short term. To minimize this issue, Kilimo changed the feedback periodicity to quarterly, but, even with the modification, they still missed a more situational and continuous process.

Another issue, which also brought dissatisfaction to the organization, was that the feedback occurred only in the leader → led sense. This generated a dynamic of little constructive work because exchanges in other directions - led → leader, peer → peer or led → indirect leader - were not a common practice. In a way, this scenario brought some points of alert for the organization: feeling that employees could help in the development of their co-workers, low role in personal growth, slow progress as a professional, among others.

In addition, feedback was carried out in face-to-face meetings when the leader spoke to the team member about their strengths and improvement, but without making any records about what was discussed. Over time, they noticed that this lack of documentation could bring some problems to the organization, such as: low alignment between the leader and the subordinate or forgetting about what are the development points that must be worked on. Due to this, Kilimo chose to document the information through Google forms, but this change did not have major positive effects.

How was the post-Qulture.Rocks era?

Kilimo sought a platform to unify all management related to the company's culture. With Qulture.Rocks, which has a suite of products for performance management, the company was able to unify all the necessary features to manage its employees' performance in one place.

In this new stage, through the Feedback Product, Kilimo started to work on aspects such as: sincerity and co-responsibility, making sure that everyone in the organization participates in the development of their collaborators, regardless of the role they have. As a result, I started implementing a 360 feedback process in which it was possible to send and receive feedback from different people in the organization, in addition to the direct leader. Little by little, Kilimo was the testimony of an important change in the way his collaborators related to each other.

Other practice that could be also done was the situational and continuous feedback exchange. I lead a much faster process of developing teams that help reinforce Kilimo's desire to be an agile company, which evolves at a higher speed in the market and in which employees have the responsibility of everyone's development.

What benefits does the Feedback product provide to Kilimo?

There are four main positive points:

  1. Mayor sincerity and co-responsibility in the development between leaders and employees;
  2. More clarity about the strengths and opportunities of professional and personal improvement;
  3. Active participation of all employees in the development between work colleagues;
  4. Practices in sending comments. This is largely due to the option of standard formats and pre-registered on the platform, such as the stop-start-continue model. These models help Kilimo to: (i) Encourage feedback between people with whom there is a daily interaction; (ii) Identify exactly how many of the points that must be decided to help a collaborator to develop.

What were the gains for Kilimo?

The Qulture.Rocks platform helped Kilimo employees to create the habit of soliciting comments on the topic when they ended a meeting, a project or a presentation. This change of habit caused requests for feedback on the platform to grow 4 times between October 2020 and 2021.

Also, it can also be noted that employees began to send spontaneous feedback 5 more times between October 2020 and 2021. This has a positive impact on the culture of the organization because it potentiates essential behaviors for the company, such as: responsibility, sincerity, feeling of participation in the development of collaborators and greater proximity to the leader.

Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the Feedback Product at en Kilimo was a key element to help the company develop its collaborators with my agility with the evolution of the business. It is also worth mentioning that this cultural change, while providing feedback, helps the organization to reinforce its values ​​- criteria, autonomy, curiosity, efficiency, being part, sencillez, communication and innovation - for all, providing greater clarity about what attitudes and behaviors are expected in daily work.

Feedback in numbers

Now that I have Kilimo's story with a new feedback product, we would like to tell you 4 reasons why you should adopt this practice in your organization:

  • Only 58% of Piensan leaders who give enough feedback - Lago, 2018
  • 72% of employees would like to receive daily or weekly comments - PUC 2011
  • The companies where the leaders don't ask for comments have a promised commitment of around 29% - Comments at the place of work: it is better to receive what to give - Forbes
  • Companies that do the opposite: leaders ask for and provide feedback; promedio commitment increases to 74% - Comments on the place of work: it is better to give than to give - Forbes

So, are you ready to start this practice in your company?