In my last Insight, I discussed how honest feedback is a stepping stone to a transformed workplace.
Before you can ever provide feedback to anyone or about any process, however, you must first establish goals, parameters and benchmarks.
Once that has been established, feedback should be given day in and day out. There has to be a regularly scheduled time for feedback. Unfortunately, this usually only occurs during the annual review process. Feedback can occur in a group setting or individually and, at the very least, should be given on a quarterly basis.
Oftentimes what happens—and what I’ve seen over the years—is that employees really do hunger for and want feedback more than just one time a year. As I mentioned earlier a discussion about performance has been relegated to the annual review process, but that, quite frankly, is not going to impact performance.
It has to happen more frequently.
Managers need to walk around providing some sort of feedback to employees every single day. Input is needed that is specific to a process as well as to encourage employees to perform at a higher level.
This type of feedback is more informal, but still appreciated.
Unfortunately, most companies, managers and leaders are not taking the opportunity to give constructive feedback.
When I was a manager/supervisor, I made sure of two things:
- That the annual appraisal process wasn’t surprising to employees in any way; and
- That I provided feedback throughout the year and not just one time annually.
I took advantage of any opportunity I had to give an employee feedback.
Despite the excuses given by company leaders, giving feedback is not difficult. You just have to discipline yourself to do it.
Giving feedback governs trust between managers and employees.
Not providing performance feedback to employees is like poison slowly being released into an employee’s mindset and can potentially create a system where everything becomes suspect. Things get questioned, morale is diminished and, if not addressed, will have a domino effect on everyone else around the infected employee.
So it’s important to remove the variable of “not knowing.”
An Example
There have been many, many clients in various industries that I’ve worked with and coached in the area of performance feedback, and the formula is always the same: For example, companies want to achieve a certain revenue growth goal or revenue target, but this goal isn’t shared throughout the organization—with the management team, leaders and employees alike.
So what I’ve had to do with many companies is to get them to understand the importance of communicating organizational goals to everyone. It’s amazing that a company can arrive at a goal and not communicate it to the people who are responsible for execution.
How does that work? I’ll tell you how: It doesn’t.
But for some reason, companies think this is information that should be guarded because they don’t think they can let employees know how much money the company makes or some other erroneous idea.
So I’ve really had to coach these companies and encourage them to explain and share their goals. I’ve also had to talk to them about communicating to their teams on a daily basis about the progress being made to achieve those goals and providing feedback from that point.
I also coach them not to stop there, but to take a moment to find out from employees what’s working and what’s not working. Making improvements needs to be a collaborative and continuous process.
Many business owners think just because they started the business that they know better than anyone else what’s good for it or what it needs to be successful and that’s not always the case.
Business owners are not the only ones in their organizations responsible for making sure the revenue-growth goal is achieved.
So that’s why I coach them to make sure everything in the organization is collaborative and I make sure they communicate their goals to everyone in the organization, as well as give daily progress updates to employees. This allows employees to be part of the process and to benefit from the work they are doing.
I also encourage them to do something to celebrate reaching that goal with employees—whether it be creating some kind of profit-sharing program or something as simple as having a party that commemorates goal achievement.
Little things like that will oftentimes have more of an impact on employees than a financial incentive. Sometimes less really is more.
Overall, you should never, ever, ever underestimate the value of honest, two-way feedback.
Feedback from a manager/leader and feedback from those who are part of the process allows employees to improve and be more productive at what they do daily.
The reality is, we all have blind spots—things we don’t realize we need to improve—I don’t care who you are or how successful you are.
Blind spots can destroy you or destroy what you’re trying to build if you’re not aware of them. But by having honest dialogue about the expectations of the organization and the performance of employees while discussing how to make it better, you are creating the professionalism needed to get the job done.