5 Steps for Success: Constructive Feedback

It is a manager’s responsibility to provide employees with continuous feedback. Performance reviews are not an effective tools in today’s fast changing work environment. To be useful, feedback must be timely and relevant in recognizing good performance and providing constructive feedback to correct any issues impeding employee’s success. Generally speaking, if an employee is underperforming, the first step is to have a candid conversation with them. It’s a manager’s responsibility to address poor performance or any unproductive behaviors which are not aligned with corporate culture, values, and goals. The goal is to engage the employee in the conversation to gain perspective on what’s going on and then create an action plan to address the poor performance and correct the inappropriate behavior. Performance conversations should always be solution-focused based on behaviors that were actually observed.

5 steps for success in addressing poor performance or unproductive behaviors:

1.      Get to the source

Do not ignore poor performance or behavior and be proactive in addressing situations in which employees are not meeting your expectations. The vast majority of employees are responsible adults. If a problem develops and is brought to their attention, they want to solve it. Showing concern and trust, and involving the employee in finding a solution, you are likely to get the desired results. Be direct. Explain what you’ve observed sticking to facts and concrete examples and ask for the employee’s insights and perspective on what’s going on. Only once you uncover the reasons for the poor performance or behavior you’d be able to work towards a solution.

2.      Create a Plan

Taking a long-term view, help the employee develop a short-term plan “must improve and achieve” focusing on desired outcomes as well as a long-term road map to success plan mapping out long term objectives relating to specific career goals. Obtain employee’s commitment to take positive action steps forward. Help the employee identify available resources for support.

3.       Solicit Commitment

Review the job responsibilities and expectations with underperforming employees and help them better understand their role and the impact on the business when they are not pulling their weight. Make sure you are setting clear deliverables and hard deadlines. It is a manager’s job to assign responsibilities and divvy up the team workload fairly and make sure everyone is toeing the line.

4.      Build on Strengths

You’ll see more success when you take advantage of employees’ strengths and interests rather than investing scare resources such as your time in correcting weaknesses. Get to know what excites your team members about their jobs and try to create opportunities that closely aligned to their strengths and interests. Give people a chance to shine.

5.      Establish Goodwill

Recognize good performance and provide tangible incentives for people to work toward, on a group and individual basis, within the company’s incentive system: a catered lunch, offsite group fun activity, a day off, and monetary incentives such as bonuses or prepaid trips. Listen to what is meaningful to your people, and make it worth their efforts.

Best practice is to document conversations with employees, good and bad, as a strategy for long term employee development. Human memory is quirky and unreliable. We need to forget things to avoid memory overload and clear more memory space for immediate more relevant information, and thus we may forget important information or details in the process. The benefits of documentation far outweigh the time required to write a brief report of the discussion. Sticking to the facts note what topics were discussed, the issues or concerns and the commitments and agreements for future reference. When both you and the employee review and initial the document and keep a copy, it can prevent future misunderstanding. It’s always best to take a few minutes to do the write-up on the same day that the conversation takes place.

Using continuous employee feedback is the best talent management strategy to improve employee engagement and performance as well as invest in employees’ long term development and growth.