Do you ever hear from your people that they want to give great feedback, but they’re not sure how? Do you think the feedback at your organisation could be taken to the next level? Here at Advanced we know the power a helpful piece of feedback can have, in order to improve performance and set development goals. We want to empower everyone to up their skills in giving feedback; that’s why we’ve written this article, to provide some helpful tips you can pass along to your people on how they can take their feedback skills to the next level.
Give feedback as soon as possible
When something happens that makes you want to give feedback, whether this is working with someone on a project, watching someone presenting in a meeting, reading a piece of work someone has written etc. try to give your feedback as soon as possible.
By giving feedback in real-time you can be sure that the experience is fresh in your mind, and you get all the details accurate. If you wait too long to give your feedback you might begin to forget the specifics, or you could just forget to give the feedback all together.
It is also more helpful to the person receiving the feedback to get it in real-time, as the event is still fresh in their mind and it makes it more relevant to their current performance.
Giving feedback in real-time, rather than once or twice a year, means that there is an accurate record of a person’s performance throughout the year, removing recency bias and making the feedback process more equitable.
Try to give a mix of positive and constructive feedback
We’re all keen to tell someone when they’ve done a good job, and that’s great! It’s really validating to hear what we’ve done well, but sometimes the most helpful feedback can be the kind that points out what we could do better.
So absolutely keep cheering on your colleagues for all their great work, but also try to mix in a good amount of constructive feedback too. You can pair the two together, here is what you did well, but here is a suggestion for where you could improve moving forward.
Use examples
When you give feedback try to be specific. Just telling someone they’ve done well or they need to improve might not be too helpful, highlight some examples of what was good and areas they could be working on.
For instance if you‘ve just worked with someone on a project and you found they weren’t great at communicating, rather than just saying ‘communicate better’ you could say ‘you forgot to tell me you were making changes to ‘x’, this means I was out of the loop and this is how it affected my work…’.This shows the person the impact their actions had and highlights the importance of improving this.
On the same note, if someone presented well at a meeting you could say to them ‘You did a great job of presenting, you spoke very clearly and your slides were very informative, I found ‘x’ part particularly interesting.’ This shows them that you were really listening, and if they are interested in developing their presentation skills this could help them see where their strengths are.
Think about how your feedback will be used to set goals and improve performance
Ideally your feedback will be used by your colleagues to set goals, in order to improve performance and work on development. Try keeping this in mind when you are giving your feedback, give details and make suggestions for development and improvement where possible.
You can try using the SWOT method. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It’s a way of giving feedback that allows you to tell someone what you think they are good at, where you think they could improve, opportunities you can see for them to develop and any possible barriers they might come across that could affect their performance.
Following these tips will help you give better feedback to your colleagues, but if you really want to encourage great feedback to be given at your organisation you should look to invest in a platform like Advanced Clear Review. Advanced Clear Review is our continuous performance management platform which empowers employees to give and receive real-time feedback quickly and easily.
With our Microsoft Teams integration, employees no longer need to leave their Teams app to open up another platform to give feedback. The ‘Feedback Circles’ feature allows employees to send a template to request feedback based on a number of experiences over time rather than just in the moment. New tools like Voice Notes and AI have been put in place to empower everybody to give great feedback, regardless of their written skills or ability to put their thoughts down on paper.
Get in touch with us today to talk to a member of our team about starting your continuous performance management journey.