To foster a supportive company environment where all employees are acknowledged for their work, offer advice on how to develop professionally, and give an ear their grievances and resentments. Organizations must understand the importance of employee feedback in their employee performance management process. Both employees and managers must be encouraged to create an organizational culture that supports receiving, soliciting, and giving employee feedback.
What is feedback?
Feedback is all about sharing information at the right time with the right people. Often stereotyped as negative information that flows only from the managers to their staff, feedback is actually about co-employees at all levels of an organization offering constructive suggestions for future improvement.
It offers channels for reinforcing each other’s work, create learning experiences for both, the staff and managers, and encourages continuous improvement.
A company’s workforce is undoubtedly its most valuable asset and investment. However, an ongoing commitment to the development of people responsible for taking your organization ahead is easily lost in the humdrum of daily business operations. There is an immediate need for strengthening employee performance management via positive employee feedback.
Here are some of the practical steps businesses can take to yield the benefits of employee feedback and foster a happier and more productive workforce.
Regularly give feedback instead of once in a year
Take steps to provide regular feedback to your employees. Do not wait for annual or semi-annual performance appraisals to provide positive reinforcement and productive suggestions to your colleagues. Open communication lines help foster an inclusive organizational culture which makes employees feel that they are a part of the company’s long term goals and their contributions are significant in the organization’s progress.
Deliver feedback in person.
Study after study emphasizes on the fact that the majority of the employees like it better when the feedback is delivered to them personally. Sometimes, owing to the geographical discrepancy or time-crunch, emailing or discussing it over the phone might be the only option. But whenever possible, it is best to deliver the feedback personally as it provides you with the opportunity to capitalize on the dialogue and develop better business processes.
360-degree feedback.
360-degree feedback allows the organization to discover newer channels to encourage employee feedback that benefits the organization as well as employees. Under this system, an employee is rated by superiors, peers, subordinates, and even clients in some cases. As the employee’s work is studied from all perspectives and this helps them gain an insight into how others perceive their work and provide them avenues to bring about changes in their work style and realize the company’s goals.
Offer training.
Frequent training and meetings help rally your workforce to adapt to changes, establish expectations, share meaningful information, and reinforce best practices. It can help manage expectations and offer valuable skills on how to productively manage feedback and learn newer means of expanding one’s knowledge and actively participate in knowledge sharing.
AssessTeam is committed to helping our clients soar above and beyond the competition. A large part of that commitment includes providing effective employee performance management software to help foster employee professional development.