
Ask HN: Micro-feedback at work and cultural differences - kulesh
My team is building Karmabot.chat, a tool for gathering micro-feedback on chats.<p>The bot works on Slack, MS Teams and Telegram and tracks in-chat team performance (&#x27;karma&#x27;, very similar to Reddit concept) via simple set of commands:<p>`@user ++ for fixing that annoying bug`<p>and, for example<p>`@user 2-- for showing up late AGAIN`<p>I&#x27;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.<p>As they say at Startup School, &#x27;keep it simple&#x27;, hence one of the features in question is the _concept of negative karma_.<p>So, my question to the friendly community: is it OK to use negative karma as a measurement tool for professional accountability?<p>Consider the following scenario, say, you&#x27;ve:
- missed an important meeting,
- actively avoiding daily standups,
- broken company&#x27;s website,
- did not show up for work,
- constantly ignoring your colleagues requests, etc<p>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?<p>Please note your current location in your response.<p>Thanks so much . It&#x27;s super hard to build a product that people actually want to use.<p>Link to the product: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;karmabot.chat<p>P.S.: From what we&#x27;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
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stevenwliao
US 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.

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kulesh
Thanks. 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.

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karmabot
Dec 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%)

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stevenwliao
"Broke the company website" is a process problem, not a people problem.

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kulesh
I agree. I pulled those lines from the teams that use the negative karma
feature.

