How to feedback: 3 things you should consider.

Who does not know the situation: You are new to a company or already there for some time, and then the management introduces new values, one of them being “OPEN FEEDBACK”. Many might say: Wow, nice, this might help me to increase my performance and to improve my skills. What might happen in reality is that from each feedback session your hopes decrease and at some point, you just say: “Why am I still doing this? How does that help me?” So let’s rewind and analyze what happened?

What has been labeled as open feedback might in reality be an unstructured, undocumented feedback approach that is not focused on goals.

Let’s go through those points together and see why they are so important when it comes to having constructive feedback.

?Feedback sessions should be set up in a way that fits best the person’s personality who is taking part in them.

Why does feedback need to be structured?

There are many ways of doing feedback sessions. In literature, you will find tons of hints and do’s and don’ts, telling managers what the perfect feedback should look like. Unfortunately, none of those tips help if the manager cannot structure the conversation. At best only a few important topics will get missed or be forgotten. Worst case, one person is really extroverted and the other introverted and it will be a one-way conversation.

Feedback sessions should be set up in a way that fits best the person’s personality who is taking part in them. There is not ?the one way” that works for everyone. People are different, so why use the same way of conducting feedback sessions with everyone?

It is the managers task to understand their employees and to think of ways of enabling communication with them. There needs to be some structure in it so that the counterpart knows what is about to come and is not hit by surprises which they must first digest and cannot directly react to.

?

Structure is your start!

One good approach is to go through the open points step by step and to explain with detailed examples on how you see the situation. Then, give the person opposite of you the chance to think about what you said and come up with an answer to it. Maybe this person sees it in a completely different way, has more information about it and can explain the situation so that you can better understand it. Be open-minded, listen to what the other person has to say. This is not a one-way street!

?

Reflecting on the past feedback brings the potential to improve.

Documentation is key!

Companies and managers LOVE feedback sessions, they spend time with the employees, telling them what they are doing wrong and how they could improve. By doing that they feel special and important as well. The thing is, most of the time, it only mirrors a very small time frame, normally a couple of days. To be honest, which manager is really taking notes throughout the months with positive and negative points that he or she could discuss with the employee? Most managers might take 5 minutes to reflect before the session, so many times they will refer to recent situations. Employees might have done a great job, with some mistakes in those last days, and probably the feedback will be devastating.

Documentation can ease that pain. Start documenting every feedback session, from both sides. Take some minutes after the session and write down the main topics that were discussed, sign those, and keep them safe. When the next feedback session is about to come, look at it again: What was discussed last time? What did we want to work on? What was the problem and did it improve? And this is not only for the employee but also for the manager!?

Reflecting on the past feedback brings the potential to improve. Coming up with new things every time might be nice but at some point, the employee just thinks: Ok, thanks for the feedback and knows that there will be no follow-up and no real space to improve. And by the way, it is quite demotivating if you cannot see real progress in what you are doing.

?So, document what you say, look at it before the next feedback, make it part of the new session, and add new topics as well. Always go through the list and see how and why things improved or not. This is one major point of development.

?

Define goals!

If you don’t have any defined goals, what do you want to rely your feedback on? Do you compare a junior with a senior when they are working on the same things? No, you define what each employee must deliver, what the person is there for, and how he or she is supposed to work. Only if those things are defined you can put productive feedback in place. This includes looking at how a person performed, how well the job task was done, how fast it got done, and what was missed.

?If you let your employees work freely and on random topics, it is quite impossible to track progress if you are not looking over the shoulder all the time.

Giving feedback in such an environment will become very disappointing for the employee. The employee worked a lot, did many small tasks that needed to be done, invested a lot of time, but the only thing the manager saw is that there is no real progress.

Conclusion.

Having bad feedback structures is a struggle. Employees do not take it seriously after some time, they feel more like being bashed during those sessions and that is counterproductive. Why should they invest more time into their work if only the bad things are seen? People also get demotivated as they don’t see any development potential for themselves and that is the point where it gets ugly for the company because then the employees will start looking for a new job.

A well-structured and documented feedback with well-defined goals on the contrary will be seen as a possibility to grow, to improve and to develop their skills. People will try harder as they see progress, they will try out new ways, take over new tasks as they know that they will take away some learning from it.

As a manager, like I mentioned before, there is no perfect way of doing feedback sessions. If you have the feeling that it is not working very well, ask your employee what he/she thinks about it. Encourage them to tell you what should or could be changed so that that person feels more comfortable with it. Be flexible and take a step towards your employee and you should see results that make both sides happy.

How do you feedback? Based on which points do you structure your session?