10 Things to Keep in Mind When Giving Employee Feedback

For the past 2 years, since the pandemic began, attrition has been at an all-time high all over the world. Many factors have led to this “great resignation”, but in order to become a competitive player in the current landscape, these factors must be considered. A study conducted by Forbes in 2019 found that 66% of employees would leave if they did not feel appreciated, while other research has pointed out that understanding one’s role and perceiving a stagnant career growth were the main reasons for unwanted attrition. Does your company have a proper way to provide meaningful feedback? How is this documented? Do you have any oversight over the quality and relevance of these 1-on-1s among your employees? If any of the answers to these questions is “no”, perhaps your company is lacking employee feedback that your employees deserve, leading to employees leaving the company.

Here are some things that you can do right now to provide meaningful employee feedback:

1. Build Trust in your Company Culture
   • Company Culture must be treated as a product; constantly iterating and evolving. Among the things to look for is open communication, so you and your employees are comfortable speaking with each other.
2. Deliver constructive feedback frequently
   • Continuous employee feedback is key in building and maintaining high-performing employees. When you continuously provide feedback and recognition to your employees, it goes a long way to keep them happy and productive. In a study conducted by Robert Half, feeling appreciated is a key driver in making employees happy in the workplace.
3. Recognize deserving employees
   • Deserving employees want and need recognition, recognizing them is an important facet of giving employee feedback. A study conducted by Hubspot says that 69% of employees say that they would work harder if they felt that their efforts were recognized better.
4. Sometimes, less is more.
   • You can’t have too much of anything. Practice giving continuous and frequent feedback to your employees but don’t overdo it to the point where they feel micromanaged, let your employees feel empowered to do their job the best way they can.
5. Negative feedback is not bad!
   • Here at Sprout, we practice “Radical Candor”. It’s a management philosophy based on caring personally while challenging directly. Practicing this is not only healthy for you and your employees but is beneficial for the company because confronting issues is embedded in who we are. Mistakes are to be shared if we want to correct them.
6. Break the Power distance
   • As Malcolm Gladwell mentions in his book Outliers, Power distance, the relationship between employees that disallows challenging one’s bosses, can be, quite literally in some cases, deadly. A healthy company provides feedback that goes both ways, having mutual employee and manager feedback will provide a company culture that is progressive and will build a culture of trust.
7. Show respect when giving feedback to employees
   • Meaningful feedback or even radical feedback must come from a desire for improvement. When sharing feedback, show your employees the respect that they deserve. And remember the old adage “praise in public, criticize in private. This type of feedback will foster hardworking and motivated employees.
8. Listen
   • Feedback is a two-way street. When giving your employees feedback, you should also be open to hearing what they have to say and discussing it.  Both parties should be part of the conversation and feel heard. This is easy to practice by asking them what they are feeling and what current challenges they are facing. By then, you can work together to identify a real solution to help them overcome the challenges.
9. Know your employees
   • Feedback is more impactful when you understand where your employees are coming from, and where they want to go. Not all people are the same, and understanding the differences in the ways your employees work, what motivates them, what they want out of their career, and who they are as people makes it easier to provide constructive and continuous feedback.
10. Help them grow
    • Lastly, providing your employees with opportunities for learning, growth, and development is a sure effective way to make them more productive and motivated at work. This is particularly observed to improve attrition, so it’s something that will help you two-fold. Providing learning sources alongside giving employee feedback is a formula for success.

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  How does your company provide feedback? With Performance+ you can apply all of these and more in an automated and modern way! Performance+ brings your performance management process full circle by giving you two facets of employee feedback in one system. Performance+ automates and streamlines your performance management process so any skills needed from your employees can be automatically improved. Its built-in Learning Center is a vast content library of training courses that will help your employees’ core competencies and along with it your company’s performance.