Through a mix of carrots and sticks or the ways to give feedback to your employees

Hi, colleagues!

How often do you give feedback to your employees and do you give it at all? We are sure that the work of team members is a reflection of the emotional maturity of its leader. And behind the back of any leader stands the team, which is important to build in such a way that it becomes a real support of the company. There are no such teams in nature, but they can be created and the ability to give effective two-way feedback plays a special role in this process, because there is no worse emotional state than the one when a person stays in an information vacuum.

When an employee has all the information regarding KPI, quality of work, interaction with colleagues and a top management, he/she can fulfill all the requirements in an appropriate manner. Moreover, the feedback itself can be different: positive, negative, neutral, motivating, criticism. The most important thing here is HOW you present information to an employee. There’re lots of feedback models, such as: sandwich, BOFF, SOR, SLC. The main point of feedback is to understand for what meaning it should work and in what way.

Let’s briefly go through the scheme of each of them:

• Positive beginning (positive aspects of the employee’s work) — middle / filling (what needs to be adjusted) — positive completion (employee’s motivation towards success and self-confidence).

• Employee’s behavior (Behavior) — Outcome behavior — Your feelings as a boss (Feelings) — Future.

• Standard (adopted internally) — Observation (violation of the standard) — Result (Result).

• Successes — Learn — Change — a very effective model for the IT industry, especially Scrum companies, because after each sprint you can summarize the results, and after the completion of the project record the final results.

For my part, I can note that the feedback model in our company directly depends on each individual employee. We try to integrate newcomers into the team according to the “sandwich” principle, since motivation and emphasis on achievements, even if not so significant, are especially important at the adaptation stage. For more “mature” employees, the remaining models are applicable. The main thing is to remain objective and try not to criticize, but to think together.