Good management is about helping your employees to reach their full potential and flourish in the workplace. Giving feedback is an essential part of this process, but the way in which you feed back to your employees could make or break their performance.
Let's take a look at why the feedback you give your employees is so important and how to give positive feedback and improvement-based feedback effectively.
Why Your Feedback Matters
Giving feedback badly can be worse than not giving any feedback at all. It could damage your employees' self-confidence and hamper their performance at work. When you're delivering feedback to your employees, make sure that they understand that your intention is to help them to develop their skills and succeed, even when you're pointing out their weaknesses.
Employees are one of the most valuable assets any organisation has. By managing a talent pool effectively, organisations can make incredible long-term gains in performance, efficiency, and innovation. If your managers don't encourage employees to flourish, your business can't reach its full potential either.
How To Give Constructive Feedback To Coworkers
If you want to get the best out of your employees, it's important to enter into feedback meetings with the right attitude from the start. Don't view corrective feedback as negative, or use words that sound critical. Recognising that all employees have strengths and weaknesses, and spending time addressing both of these in each session, can help you to adjust your own approach to delivering feedback.
Other tips to bear in mind when delivering constructive feedback to employees include:
• Establish trust with your team members and engage in regular conversations as part of your job. This allows you, as the line manager, to have the mandate for feedback and to encourage it in return.
• Don't make assumptions. If an employee makes a mistake, make sure you understand why the mistake was made and give your employee a chance to explain.
• Be specific in your message and your examples. Make it clear what the issue is and how the employee can remedy it. Explain what you've observed and how this impacts the team.
• Balance out the negatives with positives. Take the time to explain what your employees are doing right as well as what they're doing wrong - though it's often better to schedule separate feedback sessions for positive feedback and corrective feedback to ensure that your employees aren't confused by mixed messaging.
• End every feedback session on a positive note. Reiterate that you're on their side, and offer them your support if they need any help actioning the feedback you've given them.
Get In Touch
PDW offer business development and training programmes to transform the behaviour and performance of people, teams, and organisations. To find out more about how to build, train and manage your team for success, call us today on 0115 647 1814.
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