How often do you provide feedback to your employees? Feedback can often be difficult, but it is an essential requirement for the smooth running of any organisation. Effective employee feedback will help your team improve their personal and professional lives; however, approaching it in the wrong way can lead to individuals feeling insulted or upset.
So how do you provide effective employee feedback? We thought we would take a closer look…
Why is feedback important?
Before we take a look at how to provide effective employee feedback, it is first necessary to understand why it is essential. Feedback is crucial in making your employees feel like they are part of the company and helping them to become more engaged with your brand’s values. Feedback also helps strengthen relationships between manager and employee and identify clear targets and objectives.
However, despite its importance, only 28% of employees receive regular feedback. One of the most common factors for companies not providing feedback is not wanting to upset their staff. Poorly delivered feedback can come across as insulting, resulting in employees becoming defensive and the process having a negative rather than positive impact.
5 tips for providing effective feedback
Knowing how to provide effective feedback is crucial in helping your employees to grow and flourish without feeling upset or personally insulted. If you are looking to discover the benefits that effective feedback can bring your business, there are some top tips to remember:
1) Provide it regularly
Rather than waiting for an annual appraisal, for the best results you should make sure that you are providing regular, ongoing support. Holding frequent sessions will help employees to track their growth while also helping them to get used to hearing professional feedback.
2) Be specific
Another top tip for providing professional feedback is to make sure that you are being as specific as possible. Where possible, you should use quantifiable facts so that employees know exactly what it is that you mean. Being too vague will lead to confusion and means your team might not know where they can improve.
3) Do it face-to-face
While remote working has become incredibly popular in recent years, there are certain tasks which should be done in person. Feedback is one of these, and you should make sure that you are sitting down face-to-face and one-to-one, as this helps to reduce the chances of miscommunication and makes employees feel more relaxed.
4) Be positive
While the idea behind providing feedback is to highlight areas that your employees can improve on, you do not want it to come across as negative or insensitive. That is why you should make sure you are being positive as well as providing them with praise on the things that they are doing well.
5) Be collaborative
Effective employee feedback should not be a one-way conversation. Instead, make it an open conversation and allow them to respond and ask questions about the points that you are raising. This not only helps to reduce negative repercussions, but it can also help them understand where they can improve.
Want to maximise your team’s performance?
If you are looking to boost your team’s performance, then PerformanceHub can help you. Our proven employee performance management software has been designed to help your entire organisation perform at its best.
Our PerformanceHub allows you to create dedicated Personal Development Plans for your team, provide direct feedback, establish one-to-one meetings, and much more. Want to find out how Cogendo can help you? Get in touch today!
