Porto Tech Center (PTC) is an IT-development center of approximately 200 engineers based in Porto, Portugal where we create and maintain online platforms, data warehouse solutions and mobile applications for Africa Internet Group (AIG) companies, such as e-commerce giant www.jumia.com, e-marketplace www.kaymu.com, online booking www.jovago.com, logistics and warehousing www.aig-express.com and also support some others www.zando.co.za , www.hellopay.com etc.

Like every other Tech organization, nowadays, we are also facing tough competition for talent. There are multiple challenges related to recruitment, talent retention, people development, people´s career progression ant others. Obviously those are all relevant and important matters but we have put extra care and attention on one of those, which is “Performance Evaluations”. Throughout multiple years we have constantly improved it via changing the process and methodology, training evaluators, changing periods and by introducing new software tools (www.upsteem.com) to support the whole exercise.

One of the “hot topics” have been whether or not and how to implement 360 performance feedback in our organization. We have spent time on benchmarking with other similar companies and also explored different HR software’s that offer it as part of their core functionality. Nevertheless, we ended up doing something very simple, agile and out of the box.

We gathered all the people during lunch brake on April the 1st (“International Fools day”), gave everybody 3 stickers with www.facebook.com “Like-signs” and asked people to use those stickers to give feedback to their colleagues by placing the “Like-signs” on their favourite team-mates clothes. As a result, you probably guessed it already, it had positive effect on peoples motivation and mood as it is fun by nature, it made people to interact, to share feedback with each other and what is the most important – it made people smile. Believe it or not, sometimes one smile is more valuable than thousand “thanks’”. Therefore, I would like to encourage every company to follow that example and experience yourself the positive impact.