Employee feedback is vital for any business or brand. It has a direct impact and correlation on employee motivation, engagement, and productivity. These then combine to have a direct impact on your brand’s success.
Providing this feedback isn’t a question in this day and age. It’s something the modern employee doesn’t just want, it’s something they expect in a healthy work environment.
This is for a couple of reasons.
- Builds mutual trust: Even if they don’t like what you’re saying, employee feedback has a positive impact on the trust between employee and employer. The more open and honest you are, the more employees will respect what you have to say and buy into it.
- Allows employees to improve: 74% of employees say they’re more effective at their job when they feel heard. This allows them to exceed their expectations and recognize their shortcomings.
- Builds a healthy company culture: Positive, healthy company culture can help retain employees, reduce employee turnover, and improve employee morale. Employee feedback is key to this because it builds a foundation of trust and honesty
Brands that provide excellent employee feedback go on to be brands that have productive, healthy work environments. This is the foundation of any modern brand, so getting it right is incredibly important.
How To Write An Excellent Employee Feedback in 2022
If it’s your first time writing employee feedback, this guide on Leapsome’s website offers some excellent examples of employee feedback.
Combining that with these 5 tips will have your feedback go from run-of-the-mill to excellent and informative, something you’ll help your employees to become if you get it right.
1. Be Honest, but Constructive
Not only is it frustrating to either party to beat around the bush, but it’s also confusing, irritating, and just plain unhelpful.
Shying away from harsh truths about your employee feedback not only sets them up to fail, but it will also have a direct impact on your brand. If you don’t tell someone where they’re going wrong, how can they change?
The more honest you are in your evaluation, the more an employee can use that feedback to work on improving themselves. Bearing that in mind, having the setting feel like a misbehaving school kid also isn’t optimal. You want your feedback session to be constructive as well as open and honest.
Simply coming down on your employees with nothing but negatives does not help anyone. In fact, it’s a surefire way to destroy morale and have Employee Feedback become something of an “F” word.
Thoughtful, proactive feedback can help build employees up rather than tear them down. This, when it comes down to it, is what excellent employee feedback is all about.
2. Provide Specific Examples
Vague cliches accomplish nothing. No one learns anything or can learn anything without knowing what they are.
Examples of what you think are going wrong should also be balanced out by solutions you discuss with your employees. Managers should be able to describe the problems they’ve identified, specifically and in-depth. They should be able to convey why they want what they want from an employee and how that fits with your brand’s expectations.
This should always be constructive, affirmative, and positive. This encourages employees to “buy into” the vision of themselves that you have.
One way of doing this is to have a component of your form, or in-person conversation, that asks an employee how they feel the problems you’ve identified can be solved. By including employees in solving their problems, you ensure accurate and genuine solutions.
Excellent employee feedback gives both parties something to look at working on in the future, without being overly harsh or negative.
3. Get Your Timing Right
An often forgotten, yet vital, aspect of writing excellent employee feedback is knowing when to write and deliver it.
You can use a stunning template and all the convincing language in the world, but if you’ve got your timing wrong, the whole thing is moot.
If the feedback is poorly timed, it may come across as harsh or petty. It may shatter the employee’s confidence or morale or you may catch them at a pinnacle point in a project or even just a bad day. Knowing when to give your feedback can make all the difference, especially to your employees.
Here are a few tips to help you do just that:
- Always provide a reason for why you’re giving feedback at that point
- Appoint a time if it’s major feedback, nobody wants to lose a day without advance warning
- Discuss when best suits your employee, this way you show your consideration from the get-go and no one starts with a negative mind
If you show that you’re willing to meet someone on their terms, your chances of your employee feedback going from good to great are a lot better.
4. Provide Actionable Feedback
The ultimate goal of providing excellent employee feedback is to give your employees a way to improve. Actionable feedback is one of the most important components of great employee feedback
In today’s workplaces, this is vital. Studies have shown that 83% of millennials say that when they do receive feedback it is not meaningful.
Feedback shouldn’t be either overly positive or overly negative, but honest and focused on improving where you can. Your feedback should therefore be future-focused and provide solutions to the problems or flaws you see.
Rather than just saying an employee needs to better manage their time, you can and should offer them the skills or programs to assist them with that. Remember, feedback, without actionable feedback results in inaction.
5. End on a Positive Note
Positivity is a much more motivating tool than negativity.
That’s not to say excellent employee feedback requires nothing but praise or ignoring areas where you feel employees could improve. No, excellent employee feedback demands that you give employers aspects that they can improve on.
Despite that, a little positivity never killed anyone and in fact, it’s the ideal note for your feedback to end on. Rather than the “sandwich” technique (sandwiching a negative criticism between two compliments), just focus on the tone on which you end your feedback.
The fact is that numerous studies show that having a positive outlook or approach when it comes to your employees has a much better impact than negativity. As much as 67% of employees whose managers highlighted their strengths were more fully engaged in their work
Incorporating a note of positivity in your employee feedback, especially in terms of how you end your feedback, can have a major impact on your brand’s growth. It’s not just a fun thing to do, it can actively impact an employee’s entire relationship with their managers as well as their companies.
Final Thoughts
Your employees are just as much a part of the foundation of your brand as the products you sell. When they grow, learn, and improve, so does your business.
That’s why it’s important to provide not just good employee feedback, but excellent employee feedback. Especially in the increasingly competitive, fast-paced business environment of 2022.
Essentially, this is done by writing that feedback with not just answers in mind or pointing out flaws, but by looking at your employees from a human perspective. By providing honest, constructive feedback that gives them a platform to improve, you allow employees to have an active role in their advancement.
And ultimately, their advancement is the business because employees that feel engaged, challenged, and treated as actual people, bring far more to your business than ones that receive pure, harsh criticism alone.
At its best, excellent employee feedback leads to excellent employees and as a result, excellent business.