The Right Way to Handle Employee Feedback

Why Is Feedback Important?

Feedback is an important aspect of growing your business. When it comes to providing employee feedback, it can have many different benefits that can manifest themselves in a variety of ways. By providing regular feedback, your business can experience less employee turnover. Not only does this save you some time when it comes to keeping employees in the open roles that you have, but it also saves you money. Employee turnover can be extremely costly for your business, so you should avoid it as much as you possibly can. Additionally, a lack of feedback, or even very little feedback, from managers can lead employees to become actively disengaged. This means that your employees will be more focused on only getting their job done instead of working to make your business better. If you would like to have highly engaged employees, then you need to provide them with regular feedback. The majority of employees prefer to have feedback given to them on a regular basis, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. They prefer to know where they stand in terms of their job, and they also like to know where they can improve and what they are best at, from their manager's perspective.

One major issue with a lot of companies is that they do not provide enough feedback even when they think they do. Most employees do not feel as though they receive enough feedback even though a good portion of managers believe that they do provide enough feedback. This is a major disconnect, so developing a process for quality feedback is imperative. It is not just important for employees to know how they are performing in their roles; it is also important for them to know what they can improve upon. The right structure can make all the difference in perception and action from your employees. This should encourage open dialog that you want from your employees and your managers.

Using Constructive Feedback

It is not enough to simply provide feedback to employees; you should also try to provide constructive feedback. Instead of focusing on telling employees what they are doing wrong, explain to them your expectations and how they can work toward getting it right. This is the best kind of feedback because it gives employees a path to correct their wrongdoings. This is not only beneficial to the employees, but to the company as a whole too.

When you give employees constructive feedback and they correct their actions, the business is poised to do better. The fewer mistakes that an employee makes, the better your business will run. This turns into more profits as time goes on, and the employee also feels better about the feedback conversation. When an employee is only told that they are doing something wrong, it can bring morale down and will impact how they perform in their role. On the flip side, when they are told the right way to go about things, then there is a positive view of the situation. They will not necessarily feel as though they have completely screwed up their job and now have the information that they can use to perform better. In fact, more employees prefer to receive this constructive feedback than positive feedback alone.

360-Degree Feedback

One way to get both employee feedback and upward feedback is through 360-degree feedback. With this approach, everyone that an employee works with (including management) within the scope of their role provides feedback to the employee. This is done anonymously and provides a full picture of the strengths and weaknesses of every employee. Feedback can come from managers, co-workers, and even some customers if that is how you want to set it up. This type of feedback should not be included in the performance review process since it is not a look at how they are performing, but rather a way to determine how they can improve personally and within a team as others who work with the employee view it.

Annual Performance Reviews

Annual performance reviews are another great method that you can add to your feedback plan. It works best within companies that allow open and honest feedback. However, it is not the best thing to use if you are only doing an annual performance review. It is something that you should use with other forms of feedback as well as frequent check-ins. It is a great way to look back on the year to see what happened, what can be learned from various situations, and how to best move forward. It should not only be a focus on the employee, but also on how various processes can be altered to make the job better for everyone involved.

Drawbacks of Annual Performance Reviews without Constant Feedback

As mentioned, the annual performance review on its own is not a good idea. To give you some insight into this, these are some other main drawbacks of annual performance reviews when it is not accompanied by constant feedback:

• It may not be tied to data – If a manager is required to remember an employee's performance for the entire year and they do not use data to form the feedback, it will lead to an opinion-based feedback session. This is not the way you want to go because then it is one-sided and perceptions are more likely to be flawed.
• It can be too formal – If there is no process in place for feedback throughout the year, then the process can appear to be too formal. This can cause stress for the employee, especially if they have no idea what to expect from their feedback.
• Issues are not addressed in real time – If issues are only addressed at the end of the year, then there can be a big gap in time between the issue occurring and the discussion about it. In reality, these things should be tackled head-on as they happen.

Providing Consistent Feedback

As you can see, consistent feedback is critical. It is not enough to only provide feedback at the end of the year. Feedback is an important part of the employee life cycle and it encourages better engagement. It also gives you a better picture of performance throughout the entire year. The frequency of feedback is the most important component of the feedback process and without consistent check-ins, the benefits of the process will not be seen. Over time, you will see how much this can benefit your company.

The feedback sessions that are informal can be the most telling. If an employee is not stressed about a formal process, they are more likely to be honest and open with you. Ensure the conversation is authentic and organic so you and the employee will get more out of it. When it is a two-way conversation, both parties can learn from each other and they can learn to work better together.