Modern leadership is all about trust, collaboration, and close interactions. Today, leaders are not just controllers and supervisors but rather motivators, inspirators, and encouragers. They lead their teams to achievements and success by nurturing the collaborative spirit, fostering confidence, and maintaining engagement via strong communication.
Giving feedback at work is part and parcel of effective, smooth, and resultative leader-employee communication. While encouraging their workers to provide feedback, leaders should regularly deliver feedback to their employees to improve their performance and promote their professional growth.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the major concepts and principles behind efficient employee feedback to help you readily share constructive and helpful reactions and observations with your coworkers.
Employee Feedback: Basics to Know
Employee feedback entails providing a reaction to employees regarding their performance, behavior, or professional skills. Whether criticism or positive encouragement, it’s a crucial aspect of relationships in the workplace and a powerful tool for inducing both professional and personal growth of people in the organization.
To showcase why sharing your opinion on an employee job is essential, here are a few valuable benefits it brings:
- Improving performance results: Employees need to know what they do well and where they lag behind the set expectations to be able to correct mistakes and level up their productivity. Effective and opportune management feedback will ensure prompt and effective employee actions;
- Building stronger team bonds: Open communication promotes trust-based relationships between workers and their managers or supervisors demonstrating employer eagerness to invest in their development;
- Boosting engagement: By receiving regular feedback, personnel feels more appreciated and involved in their work. This, in turn, leads to increased productivity and work satisfaction;
- Identifying training needs: By giving feedback at work and getting an employee response, you’ll detect the areas that require improvement and call for additional training or professional support to help workers generate the outcomes desired by the company;
- Stimulating ongoing communication: Feedback definitely promotes and maintains healthier and more natural communication between leaders and their workers. This also allows for identifying and settling minor issues before they grow into bigger problems.
Types of Employee Feedback
Depending on the work situation and context, there are several types of feedback leaders could give to their employees in the workplace:
- Performance feedback concentrates on the employee’s individual performance and outlines both its strength and gaps to fill in;
- Developmental feedback is aimed at helping personnel develop and hone their skills and knowledge through coaching, training, and other types of learning and support;
- Coaching feedback guides employees toward achieving specific goals or conquering certain challenges and provides the required resources for that;
- Appreciative feedback acknowledges and praises employees’ efforts and contributions to motivate and boost job satisfaction;
- Corrective feedback is provided to correct and redirect employees’ behavior and efforts to match the expected results. Most often, it’s necessary to neutralize or prevent the consequences of errors or misconduct;
- All-inclusive feedback is based on the results of the general performance overview, including input not only from managers but also from peers and customers to assess the employee’s strengths and weaknesses, identify all potential areas of improvement, and encourage future growth.
How to Provide Constructive Employee Feedback?
Giving feedback at work is not just saying what you like or dislike about an employee’s job. A proper approach will bring all the above-mentioned benefits, so it’s worth looking into the key elements of constructive and effective feedback that will be more than a mere talk and generate the desired results:
- Clarity: Your thoughts and opinions should be clear, and specific, addressing a particular issue, problem, situation, behavior, or performance result. General, vague, and dubious terms should be avoided to prevent confusion and wrong interpretations;
- Promptness: To gain the outcomes you seek, feedback should be timely i.e., given right after detecting misconduct to avert negative impacts or upon a performance review to appreciate positive outcomes and encourage further achievement;
- Focus on behavior, not personality: No matter whether positive or negative, effective feedback concentrate on behaviors and issues to be tackled and steers away from criticizing or praising employees’ personal traits. This way, you’ll consider job-related issues and won’t prioritize anyone or make workers feel pressed;
- Balance: Never highlight only negative aspects. Try to hit a balance between specifying strong sides and areas for improvement to avoid employee discouragement or feeling underestimated.
- Goal-oriented: Effective feedback is not only about pointing to mistakes or poor results, it rather should be geared toward guiding an employee to hit some specific objectives. So, it should be meaningful and relevant to the situation;
- Relying on examples: Examples illustrating the behavior or situation under discussion will make feedback more comprehensible, tangible, and actionable.
6 Best Ways to Give Feedback to Employees
While effective feedback aspects described above already give you an idea of how to share your reactions and opinions with employees, below, we’ll outline instructions on giving feedback at work that proves to be resultative in different situations and ensure that you’ll get the outcome you need.
1. Get Prepared
Don’t jump into a discussion out of a sudden, take your time to think over what you want to talk about. Get prepared by drafting a quick plan, enlisting the key points you are going to touch upon during the conversation.
This way, you’ll be more specific, mention all the issues and aspects that matter, clarify everything for yourself and your listener, sound persuasive, and won’t miss any important points.
2. Choose the Right Time and Place
Working with people on a daily basis, most likely than not, you already know their individual reactions and behaviors. Thus, someone might feel ok when getting feedback in a group while others will feel more confident and comfortable when talking in private.
The best way would be to schedule a meeting and make such discussions more or less regular. Don’t wait for monthly or quarterly performance appraisals or reviews. Feel free to give feedback immediately after some situation or event since it will have the biggest impact.
3. Be Honest and Empathetic
Surely enough, communicating positive comments and praise is much easier. However, even if you have to criticize and give negative feedback, don’t try to spruce it up or fudge the discussion of negativities. Be sincere and constructive.
If you have to talk over some problems, serious knowledge gaps, poor performance results, or other “uncomfy” things, be realistic and straightforward, don’t talk in circles. At the same time, show your empathy and try to be encouraging to prevent the receiver’s stress and frustration.
4. Avoid Using a “Sandwich” Approach
Employee feedback is primarily aimed at promoting improvement and boosting productivity. However, mixing in criticism between positive comments rather creates confusion and negatively impacts your whole feedback overall than softens the blow for the receiver.
A much better strategy is to balance negative and positive feedback and represent all your opinions in a tactful and respectful yet clear and straightforward manner.
5. Be An Active Listener
Constructive feedback should not be in the form of a monologue. Make it a two-way conversation and give your employee a chance to ask questions and articulate their own vision of the situation. Listen to them attentively and exchange opinions and thoughts.
This will help build trust-based relationships and promote a culture of open communication and continuous improvement.
6. Follow up
Don’t treat feedback as a set-and-forget talk. Most likely than not, you’ll give some sort of advice, recommendation, and instruction that implies further actions and efforts to achieve improvement. Hence, make sure to hold a follow-up check to estimate the progress.
You’ll show your appreciation to employees proving that you care about their work, growth, and success.
Bottom Line
When properly organized, provided on time, and delivered in the right way, employee feedback is a powerful management and motivation tool. It will help leaders put the team together and drive employees to success via consistent working practice improvement and a collaborative approach.
