15 Employee Feedback Best Practices for Managers — Semos Cloud

Kristina Martic
Employee Experience Management Blog
6 min readOct 18, 2019

Employee feedback is crucial for employee motivation, engagement and productivity. Giving feedback for employees’ work is not an option anymore. It is something that employees expect from their leaders.

Employee feedback is crucial for employee motivation, engagement and productivity. Giving feedback for employees’ work is not an option anymore. It is something that employees expect from their lead ers.

Why Employee Feedback is Crucial for Business Success?

A lot of research has been done on the impact of employee feedback on business success. Even though the benefits are obvious, 65% of employees say that they want more feedback on their work.

💡 Check out 6 reasons why employee recognition is crucial for business success.

employee feedback stats

In addition, who receive accurate and consistent feedback 68% of employees feel fulfilled in their jobs.

So here is why you should make employee feedback your business priority.

employee feedback importance

1. Employee feedback increases employee engagement

Increasing employee engagement is the number one goal for every organization that focuses on continuous business growth .

This is not surprising as employee engagement has a direct impact on employee productivity.

In fact, a Gallup survey found that 67% of employees whose managers who give positive feedback were fully engaged in their work.

4. Employee feedback helps employee’s growth

Millennials and younger generations want to grow their careers and develop new skills.

When employees are asked about what motivates them to stay with their employers,

  • 39% say it’s the opportunity for career growth
  • 32% say opportunity to develop new skills

Therefore, managers should see feedback as one of the tools to help their employees grow their careers and gain new or improve their current skills.

5. Employee feedback influences company culture

There are still a lot of employees that say that don’t trust their employers, and this lack of trust is often the biggest barrier to continuous company growth.

Feedback creates a culture of trust and transparency. In addition, a study from McKinsey showed that clear, transparent corporate communication among employees can help boost productivity by as much as 25%.

6. Innovation and Creativity

Continuous innovation, or more appropriately continuous change, is required for enterprises to succeed and grow in the current business environment.

Companies and leaders need to focus on innovators not just innovation. People matter, so get their insight s. Innovation lies in the people, and it requires a two-way dialogue to not only generate the creative concepts but bridge the gap between idea and execution.

1 5 Best Practices for Giving Feedback to Employees

Giving constructive feedback is not easy. However, one of the biggest characteristics of good leadership is the tendency to provide continuous feedback to employees.

1. Set clear goals and give constructive feedback

Setting clear goals comes even before giving feedback to employees. Setting clear goals and expectations is crucial for employees’ success.

In fact, performance management is often a source of great frustration for employees who do not clearly understand their goals or what is expected of them at work.

Gallup has discovered that clarity of expectations is perhaps the most basic of employee needs and is vital to performance.

In addition, great managers don’t just tell employees what’s expected of them and leave. Instead, they frequently talk with employees about their responsibilities and progress. They don’t save those critical conversations for once-a-year performance reviews.

2. Do it continuously

In fact, 43% of highly engaged employees get feedback on a weekly basis.

continuous employee feedback

Therefore, organizations needed to change the whole system of how and when employees receive their feedback.

It is essential for managers to provide effective and timely feedback on employee performance. Continuous short cycles of feedback can revitalize your whole workforce.

That is why many organizations are successfully changing their annual reviews to a continuous feedback process.

3. Explain the impact of employees’ work

Unfortunately , managers don’t put enough effort into explaining what employee’s work means and bring to the overall performance of the organization.

4. Enable employees to request feedback

Without it, employees may feel frustrated about having to wait for their annual or quarterly reviews.

5. It’s not only about performance

💡 Check out these ideas for employee recognition.

In the world of digital transformation, change management, agile and organizational restructuring, it is common for companies to struggle with embedding new behaviors into their employees.

Therefore, giving positive feedback when those new behaviors are adopted is crucial for success.

6. Focus on the positives

Many leaders tend to give feedback only in situations when something went wrong. Sometimes, this approach can have nothing but negative impact and outcomes.

Gallup ‘ s research discovered that building employees’ strengths by giving them positive feedback is far more effective than focusing on fixing weaknesses.

Moreover, Gallup did a survey that found that 67% of employees whose managers focused on their strengths were fully engaged , as compared to only 31% of employee s whose managers focused on their weaknesses .

positive employee feedback

7. Activate your managers

Gallup’s research shows that managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores. Given the troubling state of employee engagement today, it makes sense that most managers are not creating environments in which employees feel motivated.

employee engagement stats

Another Gallup study of 7,272 U.S. adults revealed that one in two had left their job to get away from their manager to improve their overall life.

Shocking isn’t it?

10. Listen to your employees and build trust

A Harvard Business Review survey found that while 58% of people trust strangers, only 42% trust their own boss.

leadership trust stats

Feedback should go both ways and employees should be comfortable and free to speak up.

15. Don’t just ask. Act!

The worst thing you can do is get feedback from your employees and then not act on it. This can be very discouraging to employees and have a very negative impact on employee engagement.

Therefore, if you are not ready to change things up based on your employees’ feedback, better don’t ask.

6 Steps to Implement a Successful Employee Feedback Program

If you are considering implementing an employee feedback initiative at your company, you should follow these steps.

  1. Identify challenges- which challenges can employee feedback help you eliminate?
  2. Identify goals- what are you expecting to achieve with employee feedback?
  3. Identify resources needed- how much workforce and other resources will you need to implement the program?
  4. Choose the right technology- how will you choose the technology that has the most potential to help you achieve your goals?
  5. Communicate internally- How will you implement and communicate the initiative to the whole organization?
  6. Measure and improve- How will you measure the results of the new initiative and improve accordingly?

Continuous Employee Feedback with FeedBck

Employee feedback initiatives don’t always work, and one of the biggest reasons for that is wrong technology.

is a FeedBck c on tinuous employee feedback soluti on that has helped companies across the world plan and implement new employee feedback initiatives or improve their existing programs.

To see how FeedBck can help you drive culture of feedback at your organization, schedule a demo today!

Originally published at https://semoscloud.com on October 18, 2019.

--

--

Kristina Martic
Employee Experience Management Blog

Google and HubSpot certified digital marketing professional with over 5 years of experience in digital and traditional marketing.