Giving Useful Feedback to Employees - What To Include & How To Deliver

Giving good useful feedback to employees is not easy. Confidence and working out what to say are both big barriers. I hope the advice in this podcast will make giving useful feedback to employees a lot easier for you.  Giving feedback to team members starts with describing What Exactly Happened – what did they do to make you want to give them feedback. Giving general feedback – good or bad – doesn’t help – it needs to be specific with examples and facts. Giving feedback effectively should also include taking the person through the impact of their actions. How did they affect the team and the business? Next, in how to give employee feedback, you should cover why their actions were good or bad. The why provides great context and help the learning process. And finally, when giving feedback at work, cover how they could improve their actions in the future to get better results. After all, you are giving feedback to employees so that you get improved results. Walk them through how they can improve.  So this covers the 4 things you should include when giving employee feedback. How to give feedback – the way in which you deliver it – also counts for a lot. Delivered well and the employees will take in what you said and put it into action. Delivered badly, and they will ignore what you say.  Whenever you give useful feedback to team members, always approach with a mindset of how to help them become better. Have an “always educating” mindset.  Next, when thinking about how to give feedback, make your feedback to the individual or team timely. Feedback loses value over time, so give feedback soon after the event driving the feedback.  I always think your feedback should be honest. Tell it how it is. Don’t sugar coat it, dilute the message etc. Saying that, remain as diplomatic and consider as possible without diluting your message. Feedback should always be specific for it to be useful feedback. General feedback does little to improve performance.  And finally, the feedback you give should be focused as much as possible on actions rather than giving opinions about the other person.  Make the effort to give useful feedback to your employees and team members. This is a must if you want to improve performance and it comes with many other benefits too.