In any relationship, communication is paramount. As a business leader, you have a unique working relationship with your staff that requires you to share your expectations. In turn, they look to you for guidance as someone who knows where their performance level should be in order to successfully meet the company’s needs.

Being able to provide constructive employee feedback is the type of practical skill that effective business leaders use to get the most out of their team. Whether someone excels at their job or needs a slight nudge to get back on track, consistent employee feedback can be a major boon when done right.

Why Giving Feedback Matters

While it may seem like telling someone how they’re doing is inconsequential for day-to-day operations, the truth is that it’s anything but. Just as customer feedback can help your company improve over time, employee feedback can help ensure that everyone’s on the same page about what’s expected of them.

When employees are left without any feedback from their superiors, a general sense of negativity can creep in. One recent study showed that 65% of employees polled wanted more feedback, with 78% saying they felt more motivated at work when recognized by their supervisors. Melissa White, an HR Knowledge Advisor at Society for Human Resource Management, said letting employee feedback fall by the wayside can leave employees feeling directionless at work.

“In today’s workplace it is easy for employees to feel unseen or unrecognized in their organization,” she said. “Providing appropriate and timely feedback to employees can be crucial in keeping them engaged and keeping turnover low.”

According to a 2021 study conducted by Zippia, approximately 40% of respondents that said they receive little to no feedback were “actively disengaged” from their job, meaning they were either ready to leave or had already begun seeking employment elsewhere. Conversely, 85% of respondents said they were more likely to be more proactive on the job whenever they received feedback from their supervisors.

How to Give Positive Feedback

There’s more to giving positive feedback to someone than just showering them with praise for their efforts. Simple praise may make you feel good at the moment, but it doesn’t get to the heart of what you’re doing right. Your role as a business leader is to hone in on what exactly is working and highlight it appropriately.

“It is important that positive feedback be meaningful and genuine,” White said. “Employees know when their supervisor is giving generic feedback to them and providing the same feedback comments to coworkers.”

The following suggestions are ways you can make sure your positive feedback makes more of an impact with your employees.

• Be quick to praise good work. Positive feedback tends to have the most impact shortly after someone’s done something worth noting. That’s thanks to a concept called the recency effect, which cognitive psychologists describe as the “tendency to remember the most recently presented information best.” If you give positive feedback for something a person did three months ago, that will be nice but it won’t be as meaningful as commending someone for working hard to finish a project last week. Just don’t give out your praise too often, otherwise White warns it will “[lose] its value.”
• Make it public when appropriate. Earning recognition from your peers is a great feeling. You could always send a positive email or hold an annual one-on-one employee review to get out your positive reinforcement, but for more day-to-day successes it could be better to share an employee’s victories with the team. Not only does something like that make the subject feel great, but it lets the rest of the team know what you’re looking for and motivates them to be just as good.
• Outline how their contributions matter. It can be easy for an employee to feel like their work is akin to shouting into the void—which is to say it’s ultimately meaningless in the company’s overall operations. Fight back against that notion by letting your employees know how their work contributes to the company’s overall success. Tell them how their work resulted in an increase in sales over the previous quarter. That kind of quantifiable data lets your employees know they are making a difference.
• Spread the praise around. Make sure that you remember to commend everyone for their hard work when necessary. Giving recognition when it’s necessary throughout the entire team reminds everyone of their importance to the company and keeps them engaged.

How to Give Negative Feedback

While it would be nice to live in a world where the only feedback people received was positive, that’s just not the case. It may seem like giving negative feedback could lead to some uncomfortable scenarios—and it certainly can—but research shows that some constructive criticism can be good. Approximately 92% of respondents in Zippia’s study said that negative feedback “is effective at improving performance” when delivered appropriately.  Sometimes an employee needs to hear how their recent performance may be lacking, in an effort to rectify the problem.

The following are just some of the myriad tips for how you can provide targeted and meaningful negative feedback to your employees.

• Be prompt. Just as you want to combat the recency effect with positive feedback, you should absolutely give corrective criticism when things go poorly. The longer you wait, the more likely that small problems fester into larger issues.
• Give it to them straight. It will do you and your employees no good if you try to lessen the blow of having to discuss their failings. As long as you remain tactful, you should be able to convey exactly what the issue is without having to walk on eggshells around the topic.
• Remind them that you’re working together. It’s very easy for an employee to look at you as a business leader and immediately see the incoming criticism as an “us versus them” issue. While there is indeed a power imbalance between you and your employees, you should remind them that the company’s continued success benefits both of you.
• Remain calm. If the issue at hand has made you mad, upset, sad, angry, or any other negative feeling, don’t speak with your employee right away. Your negativity is a natural reaction to a difficult situation but can’t be showcased when you talk through the situation.

Being Specific When Giving Feedback

Regardless of when and why you’re giving feedback, you should always be specific about what you’re addressing. Specificity is important because it gives your team members an exact idea of what they need to change or what they need to keep doing. Specificity, Dr. Peter Jensen, founder of Third Factor and author of “The Winning Factor,” said, was key to ensuring that your feedback pans out to results.

“General feedback like, ‘You were terrific, Muhammad,’ or ‘That was a great speech to the Rotary Club last night, Ashley,’ may make the person feel good, but it does little to improve his or her competence,” Jensen wrote. “How can Muhammad stay terrific if he has no idea what he did, specifically, that you thought was terrific?”

If either your positive or negative feedback is vague, your employees won’t know what you’re trying to accomplish. As a result, your well-meaning feedback could end up becoming white noise in a stream of workplace conversations.

Get Started Giving Feedback Today!

Giving feedback is an important part of any workplace, and it can be difficult to know how to give effective feedback. This post has given you a better understanding of the importance of giving feedback, as well as some tips on how to deliver positive and negative feedback in a way that will be most helpful for your employees. Feedback should always be specific, so make sure you take the time to tailor it for each individual employee’s strengths and weaknesses. If you haven’t already given feedback today, please do so! It can make all the difference in someone’s day-to-day work life.