employee feedback

Employee Feedback Will Help You Grow Your Business

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In the early stages of building your business—and even beyond—it’s important to develop good relationships with your employees. Learn to give employee feedback in ways that foster teamwork and keep your business moving forward.

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When focused on growing our businesses, we tend to pay close attention to sales and marketing processes, releasing new products or services, customer service quality, and the like.

However, if you want to build a remarkable venture, you need the best possible staff members to help you get there. It’s vital to keep in close contact with workers. What’s more, you must provide employees with feedback so they can grow and develop. Here are some feedback tips to help you get the most out of your workforce in 2022 and beyond.

Give Employee Feedback Regularly

Don’t leave feedback only to annual employee performance reviews where you kitchen sink everything at once. If you do, you will likely forget some of the most critical points you need to discuss with people. It’s more helpful to give feedback to team members regularly. In this way, workers can address problems and ideas right away. Also, employees won’t feel bombarded with too many things to work on all at once.

Just-in-time feedback will help improve business processes and results more quickly. It will ensure the same issues don’t keep happening month after month because nobody has told a worker that something they’re doing isn’t working. You might like to utilize quality performance management tech tools to help. With these tools, you and your management team can schedule conversations and make notes of points to cover in the days and weeks leading up to chats.

Regular employee feedback can and should be positive, at least in part. Positive acknowledgement for a job well done can help people feel seen and appreciated. This will lead them to becoming more engaged and committed to the company. Plus, consistent chats will help you spot opportunities to develop staff members. They will give you more insights into where employees hope to go within the business and how you can support them in getting there.

Be Specific

When providing employee feedback to your team, be specific. Don’t be vague. The more details you can provide, the clearer your conversations will be. What’s more, the more likely people will be to appreciate what they hear and make changes as necessary. There’s nothing worse than coming away from a meeting unsure what was just discussed or what is expected, so don’t do this to your workers.

Give them the chance to ask questions to clarify anything they need to, as well. And look for ways to give specific examples and use analogies as appropriate to get your point of view across more succinctly and plainly.

Be Empathetic and Respectful

For employee feedback sessions to be effective, you must communicate well and be respectful of your employees at all times. Use empathy to convey tough things kindly, and don’t be so blunt or downright rude that you make people feel small and dressed down. Try to keep a healthy balance of criticism and praise in each feedback session.

Unless you’re bringing up a problem that you need a whole team to work on, it’s best to have conversations where you provide feedback in private, one-on-one. Also, have in-person meetings wherever possible. Praise can be publicly acknowledged, though, as it can give employees an ego boost to get some recognition in front of their peers.

Listen Attentively to Employees’ Responses to Feedback

Part of good communication is listening, too. So give staff members a chance to express their side of things. Encourage them to bring up reasons why they might not have been performing as you’d hoped or why their attitude or hours have gone downhill, and so on.

Often, this listening time will alert you to issues you had no idea about but need to address. For instance, you might be piling too many responsibilities onto some workers. Or perhaps you haven’t been making the proper training or tech tools or other resources available to help people achieve what you expect of them.

Also, be open to people responding to your comments and questions after they have had some time to think about what you addressed in their employee feedback. Some people need a few hours or even days to digest information and come back to you with their take on it. As such, don’t rush people to give you answers if they say they want to think about it some more. Effective feedback is a two-way process that assists both parties, not just one.

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Let Employees Know the Reasons Behind Your Feedback

Some other employee feedback tips to follow include giving people reasons for your insights. When you do, they will have a better understanding of where you’re coming from. Also, give workers access to resources that will help them continue developing. Finally, focus on behaviors and performance rather than personalities when bringing up concerns.

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Employee feedback is a crucial part of developing a solid team that gets results year after year. Don’t neglect this task in your business and commit to doing it often and well.