How to give constructive feedback

We always interact with people in the job environment. Even if we have no team, at least we have a manager to report to. Herein, communication is crucial to establish trustworthy, clear, and strong relationships with people, and feedback is a vital part of it.

What is the feedback?

Feedback is verbal or written information given to people based on observations about achievements (positive feedback) or improvement areas (constructive feedback). Since your message is about praise and the one, who receives the feedback, is already ready to hear that, giving positive feedback is relatively easier than giving constructive feedback. Therefore, I would like to draw more attention to give constructive feedback in this post.

Getting ready to give constructive feedback

You should be prepared to give feedback. The first rule is to give feedback in a private discussion. If you give feedback to someone in a group (for example, in an agile retrospective meeting), this is not certainly feedback. This is because people in a group tend to behave differently than they receive feedback in a private discussion.

The second rule is that your feedback must include the following schema to enhance the impact of feedback.

Situation: Define the situation with the location and time.

Behavior: Define the behavior based on your observation.

Impact: Define the impact of this behavior.

Positive action: Give advice or find positive action at the end of the feedback.

Let’s build some constructive feedback to support our learnings.

Barış has been continuously arriving late to daily meetings.

I noticed that in the last three consecutive days (situation), you were late to the daily meetings (behavior). It makes me feel like I am not informed about what you did yesterday and what you will do today (impact). What do you think about this problem? How can you help me? (Positive action)

Engin likes committing his code directly to the master branch instead of opening a pull request.

I saw that in this commit (situation — don’t forget to share the commit link), you committed your code directly to the master branch instead of opening a pull request (behavior). It causes breaking deployment pipeline and wasting the time of the whole team (impact). I would like you to help the team to solve this problem (positive action).

How you say it is more important than what you say

You can notice that the language in the above examples has the feeling of sadness rather than blaming. Blaming triggers defense mechanisms in people, but feeling sad triggers embarrassment. Let me give an example; if I say, “I called you, but you didn’t answer my phone!”, then I blame you that you saw my call and you didn’t pick up the phone intentionally. On the other hand, If I say, “I called you but couldn’t reach you” and then, I feel so bad as I didn’t reach you, you will feel embarrassed and feel obliged to make a statement about why you didn’t answer the phone.

According to Albert Mehrabian’s 7–38–55 rule of personal communication, your attitude is critical when giving feedback because your body language has a 55% impact on what you say, and your tone of voice has a 38% impact. Surprisingly, your words have only a 7% impact on the person to whom you give feedback. Therefore, you should speak with a friendly voice and pay more attention to your facial expressions while keeping eye contact.

When is the best time to give feedback?

The best time is immediately after the issue occurred because feedback loses its impact as time goes on. But first, you have to check your emotions, and if you are on edge, you need to calm down before giving feedback. Don’t give feedback when emotions are high (anger or sadness). Bide your time to give feedback after emotions become normal.

Don’t forget that feedback has an expiration time, meaning that if you have feedback to give, you have to give it in 72 hours, and otherwise, the feedback will no longer have an impact on the person that you give.

Thank you for reading my post! I hope you found this information concerning giving constructive feedback useful. See you in other stories!