When executed properly, performance reviews provide an opportunity for employers to help employees grow within their roles and improve the effectiveness of their contribution to the company’s overall goals.
Poorly executed performance reviews, however, don’t just squander this potential for making positive change, but can in fact lead to negative outcomes including increased rates of employee attrition.
This recent piece from BizWomen provides insights drawn from multiple surveys that we have distilled and expanded upon below in order to help your organization maximize the value of the employee feedback you provide while minimizing the potential that it does more harm than good:
6 Top Insights For Providing Employee Feedback That Won't Backfire
- Feedback Quality: Productive feedback empowers employees to take specific actions in response to specific observations. Focus on behavior and/or work product that managers can point to as examples of where the requested adjustment is needed, and avoid feedback that addresses personality traits or vague qualities that the employee has no actionable recourse to address.
- Feedback Content: In addition to constructive criticism that is designed to shape employee output that has not met expectations, constructive praise should be provided when employee output meets or exceeds expectations, for example praise intended to reinforce positive employee contributions, ideally providing greater insight into how the employee’s efforts impacted larger company goals outside the employee’s general purview.
- Feedback Timing & Timeliness: Opportunities to provide feedback should occur both at regularly scheduled intervals (e.g. monthly/quarterly check-ins, annual performance reviews, etc.) as well as at the conclusion of projects, in the wake of operational changes, and/or in response to other catalyzing events. While unscheduled feedback opportunities will not occur at regular intervals, of course, they should nonetheless occur consistently so as to be regularly expected.
- Feedback Investment: The ability to analyze performance and provide productive feedback are skills that are best developed through the combination of education and experience. Not all managers may be as naturally gifted at these particular skills of course, but all can benefit from additional training opportunities, exposure to good role-modeling, and the receipt of feedback on their own feedback-giving performance.
- Feedback ROI: More than just better aligning each employee's work with the company-wide mission and improving productivity and output quality overall, providing better feedback is directly linked to employee job satisfaction and retention, with one survey indicating that employees who receive low quality feedback are about 68% more likely to leave the company and look for work elsewhere than employees who receive good or average quality feedback.
- Feedback Loop: The highest quality feedback can't be a one-way street - it requires that employers also solicit information from their employees with regard to the employee's own assessment of their work output, the contributions they believe they are making, and their aspirations within the company, so as to make sure that the feedback is both accurate and being delivered in a way that a given employee is capable of processing and responding accordingly.
You can read more about this topic here.
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