Effective Feedback in Multicultural Environments

Natasha Marshall, Feedback Labs | April 25, 2024

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Yoga and Sport With Refugees (YSR) is committed to fostering happier and healthier communities through the unifying force of sport, yoga, and solidarity. Established in October 2017 on the island of Lesvos, Greece, in response to the urgent need for safe spaces and holistic health services for displaced individuals, YSR’s mission is to make a lasting and positive impact by offering avenues for physical and mental well-being, breaking down cultural and religious barriers through sports and yoga, and fostering a sense of belonging. YSR leverages sports to bring diverse communities together, promotes wellness through yoga, facilitates community building, and offers skill development opportunities, enhancing the self-sufficiency of community members. Yoga and Sport With Refugees stands as a beacon of hope, working towards creating a more inclusive and interconnected world for all.

Yoga and Sport With Refugees has established a Complaint and Feedback Mechanism (CFM) designed to encourage every member of the community to express their concerns and suggest improvements for the gym and the broader community. This CFM provides various accessible channels, including text messages, voice notes, forms, and face-to-face conversations, to facilitate the feedback process. However, language and cultural differences can create obstacles to effective feedback collection. Many participants may not be fully proficient in English, and cultural variances can affect the use of formal channels, often resulting in feedback being shared verbally with volunteers or team members. Despite having a thoughtful CFM in place, practical constraints and limited capacity make it challenging to consistently gather and focus on feedback.

Gathering Informal Feedback

One of YSR’s primary questions was how they could collect and utilize feedback when so much of the feedback the organization is given comes from informal discussions. They also wanted to avoid making their gathering of informal feedback unethical and extractive. To maintain this comfortable and non-structured approach to feedback, LabStorm participants recommended strategies such as making feedback fun through games and activities, embedding feedback into existing programs and hosting discussions specifically designed to allow for feedback sharing.

Instilling a Culture of Feedback

YSR’s other main challenge was figuring out a way to instill a culture of feedback within the organization as well as in the broader community, as participants can sometimes be hesitant to share feedback. Some suggestions during the discussion included giving multiple choice feedback questions to simplify the process, allowing any member of the organization to collect feedback and obtain consent to pass that feedback on and having trusted and familiar members of the organization conduct feedback activities/sessions. Many LabStorm participants also suggested ways to demonstrate how feedback is being utilized to incentivize people to share more. These included real-time feedback application when possible, posters to show what feedback was heard and what action was taken and having people share what they learn through feedback and emphasizing that element of it.

YSR’s key takeaways from the discussion included that it would be beneficial to identify feedback practices that are already familiar to their participants, that they can move away from more structured language of feedback and that providing staff and coaches with training for collecting feedback can help gather feedback more effectively. Overall, this LabStorm emphasized that feedback collection does not have to be an extremely formal process, but can instead be done in ways that are more comfortable and creative.

Learn More About LabStorms

LabStorms are collaborative problem-solving sessions designed to help organizations tackle feedback-related challenges or share what’s working well in their practice.