“Feedback is the breakfast of champions” – Ken Blanchard.
These lines ring true because one of the greatest gifts an employer gives their team members is honest feedback.
It’s an incredibly powerful tool that can grow and increase workplace productivity. Providing constant feedback is an excellent way of telling employees you know how they’re performing and what the company expects from them. Providing employee feedback is a part of the team’s learning and development process.
To ensure a culture where employees remain motivated and productive, creating a culture of constructive feedback that helps deal with employee issues and shortcomings is the jet to organizational success.
Though it might be overwhelming, delivering positive and negative feedback can help employees perform better. But, how do you give feedback to your employees?
In this article, we list various ways of giving feedback to employees to ensure they outperform themselves while being motivated at the workplace.
10 Methods of giving constructive feedback to your employees
Here are ten methods of giving constructive feedback to employees:
Give solicited advice
Did you know that only 33% of employees feel that their feedback is helpful and worthwhile?
This is primarily because their feedback is unsolicited and can create an immense amount of stress and pressure on the person receiving it.
Often, unsolicited advice is considered an insult rather than a genuine attempt to help a candidate improve and rectify their workplace mistakes.
If your team members are not requesting feedback on their work, ask them how and when they would like to receive it.
Doing this gives employees more power and reduces the instances of receiving unsolicited feedback. Following such methods, ensure your employees act upon the feedback they receive.
Also, empower your employees to control the feedback and help them feel confident in the workplace.
Establish clear goals for employees
Before providing positive or negative feedback, ensure you establish clear goals and communicate the same to your employees.
Focus on using the SMART goals technique in which your goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. Creating SMART goals ensures you define the task to avoid multiple employee interpretations and establish quantifiable and clearly defined metrics.
Also, focus on setting clear deadlines and timeframes to ensure employees know the project deadlines.
When you set SMART goals, you create a baseline from which you can provide the employee with relevant feedback.
Provide negative feedback
According to research, employees react six times more to a negative interaction than to a positive interaction. Clearly, providing negative feedback is the key to success because it packs a stronger punch than positive feedback.
But when managers give negative feedback, they need to ensure they don’t end up criticizing the employee, as it might hamper their productivity and employee well-being.
Also, if you’re planning to give employees negative feedback, ensure you deliver it in person rather than sending an email.
Keep your tone professional and ensure it’s less punitive to decrease the likelihood that it will feel like a personal attack.
Avoid using feedback to micromanage your employees
While frequent feedback can help employees grow, providing too much feedback isn’t always helpful. Giving too much feedback to employees doesn’t allow them to work independently because you try to micromanage your employees.
It’s good to intervene only when you feel that the employee is committing an error that can harm the organization.
If they’re doing something wrong that doesn’t have a negative impact, take a step back.
This way, you wouldn’t end up micromanaging your employees and give them the independence to work creatively.
Give timely and live feedback
Have you ever held in something for months before finally telling a team member what was troubling you? Though you’re not the first to do so, it’s never the best way to provide employee feedback.
When you keep things to yourself, minor issues can become major ones, and the employee to whom you’re giving the feedback might get defensive. Also, you have indirectly robbed the employees of opportunities to improve themselves the entire time you kept the feedback to yourself.
Also, it’s much easier to solve workplace problems when you address them as soon as they occur.
When providing employee feedback, ensure you give them face-to-face because emails and text messages carry far fewer nuances than spoken communications.
If face-to-face interaction isn’t possible, focus on video call conversations or talking with the employee on the phone.
With 4 out of 10 employees actively disengaging when they receive little or no feedback, making timely and live feedback is essential for every manager.
Watch your tone and delivery
Using the right tone and delivering the information meaningfully is essential for providing constructive feedback to employees. So, when starting your conversation with your employees, lead the conversation by providing something they’re doing good on the job.
Being positive during the start of your conversation can help employees continue performing and developing these skills. Also, explicitly explain what’s hurting their performance. Focus on providing actionable feedback and specific examples.
Also, when delivering your feedback, ensure you have a growth mindset. To deliver such feedback, frame your feedback in a way it focuses on your behavior rather than traits. This gives your employee a chance to focus only on certain areas of improvement.
Create a feedback loop with your employees
The year-end performance and appraisal meeting where you sit down with your employees might not be an effective feedback mechanism.
It’s probably time for companies to ditch the yearly performance reviews and instead focus on providing feedback every month or once in two months.
What companies require to stay competitive is creating a regular feedback loop.
Even a casual assessment of employees several times during the year can help them stay motivated and productive. This way, your employees know potential areas for improvement.
Such casual assessments and the feedback loop can allow you to improve and build rapport with your team members.
Listen to your employees
When giving constructive feedback to employees, ensure employees are given a chance to respond.
As it’s a conversation between you and your employee, listen to what your employees want to say. They might face some workplace concerns that might affect their productivity and efficiency.
Use these performance meetings to allow the employees to express their ideas that might benefit the company.
Having an open discussion with your employees can help find solutions to workplace problems they face.
Be discreet and follow up
The worst thing to do while giving feedback is to give it in an open room. Some employees might feel shy when you praise them in front of everyone. Nobody wants to receive criticism in public.
So, ensure never to publicize your feedback, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative.
When giving feedback, ensure your employees are not feeling intimidated or exposed in front of the team members.
Put yourself in the shoes of your employees
If you want your employees to receive criticism and react positively to your feedback, empathy is the key.
Apart from communicating a clear message, it’s essential to think about how your employees will receive their feedback.
Being empathetic can help you provide feedback that employees want to listen to. Think about how much negative feedback is appropriate for an employee. Also, if you’re focusing only on the negative aspect, you’re likely to create a negative work culture.
It’s essential to put yourself in your employees ‘ shoes to ensure your workers are not worried and can absorb constructive criticism well.
It goes a long way in employees hearing what you’ve to say.
Key takeaways
Your employees want feedback from you – both the negative and positive. But whether your feedback is effective is an entirely different story.
Before giving constructive feedback, it’s essential to create a culture of trust. You can ensure your employees respect you and have a fair idea of what you expect from them. Pay attention to your delivery and body language.
Also, to ensure your constructive feedback delivers the desired result, keep your feedback channel open. This gives employees a chance to flag issues and helps them express satisfaction when things go well.
Last but not least, give meaningful positive feedback regularly. Don’t just stop at giving positive feedback!
There are many different ways to recognize your employees, and feedback is just one of them!
So, how are you planning to give employee feedback?
About the Author
Priya Jain has been copywriting professionally for over eight years. She has attained an engineering degree and an MBA. She teaches math, spends her time running behind her toddler, and tries new recipes while she isn’t writing. You can find her on LinkedIn.