How to Give Performance Feedback
People usually dread performance reviews. They’re seen as time-consuming, inaccurate, and overall unhelpful. Moreover, feedback is often neglected or ignored altogether. Despite their negative reputation, performance reviews don’t need to be scrapped but revamped.
Feedback is essential to any company’s employee relations. Highlighting an employee’s strengths and weaknesses is necessary for their growth, and the company’s. Effective feedback improves employee efficiency and retention, while a poor process creates stress and confusion.
Thorough performance reviews improve morale and encourage growth. Read ahead to learn the importance of feedback and how to deliver it effectively.
The Importance of Regular Employee Performance Feedback
Performance feedback is an assessment of an employee’s work behavior. An essential HR process, performance reviews cover various aspects over a given period and remind employees what they are expected to do and why it’s important to do it right.
People enjoy working in places where they feel looked after. Completing repetitive tasks without knowing how they affect the company leaves employees feeling unmotivated. Performance feedback remedies that dissatisfaction.
Proper performance reviews show employers pay attention to and care for their employees by displaying appreciation for their work and advice on improvement. While they can be difficult to conduct, they allow growth and development while improving trust and communication with managers.
How To Provide Useful Performance Feedback as an Employer
Avoid Unsolicited Advice
Unsolicited advice can create stress for the employee receiving it and is often more harmful than helpful. Ask your employees if, how, and when they’d like to receive feedback.
Employees feel more comfortable asking for advice when they control how they receive it. When your employees seek feedback, they are more likely to respond positively to your advice and act on it.
Employees should control how they receive feedback, but their behavior should never go unaddressed. Harmful habits must be managed, so don’t be afraid to approach employees simply because they don’t seek you out.
Be Specific
Performance reviews are often seen as unhelpful because they lack specificity but should clarify and improve an employee’s behavior.
General comments like “This needs to improve” or “That could have been done better” are counterproductive and leave your employees unsure about how to improve. This ineffective language leads people to believe performance reviews are time-consuming and unnecessary.
Give specific pointers on what you want your employees to do and ways to achieve those tasks. Provide examples and observations of their work behavior to help them understand and apply the feedback.
Many people feel that performance reviews are inaccurate and biased. However, if you provide specific examples of work that can be improved, your employees will be more understanding of their performance and prone to improvements.
Also, provide specifics on positive observations you’ve made. Appreciating your employees’ work not only boosts their confidence but allows them to understand the types of behavior that are encouraged.

Be Empathetic
Be mindful that the information you provide your employees can elicit strong emotions. Feedback can highlight behavior that your employees were unaware of, and the initial reaction can come across as defensiveness. No one likes it when others point out their weaknesses, so delivering feedback requires added sensitivity.
Set aside your frustrations with employees’ difficult behavior and allow them to react and process your feedback. Be aware that everyone goes through difficult times, and your employee’s poor performance could reflect a rough patch in their life.
Allow employees to explain their circumstances to gain insight into their struggles. This insight gives you the chance to offer support. Show empathy and build trust by making your employees feel heard and pointing them toward support resources.
Offer Daily or Weekly Feedback
Feedback has the greatest effect when given immediately after a notable event. Employees can adjust their behavior immediately, and won’t fall into a harmful pattern. Employee engagement increases as they are directed and given room to grow.
If you leave issues unaddressed for too long, those issues can multiply. Waiting for scheduled performance reviews may result in too many cases to address that could have been resolved if mentioned earlier, or problems could be forgotten and unaddressed altogether.
Daily or weekly feedback will help confront issues as they arise and more effectively improve performance. Routine advice avoids recency bias, where the only topics addressed are those fresh in the mind. Let your employees decide how often they want feedback, as constant direction can be overbearing and hurt productivity.
Project Positive Intentions
Performance reviews are meant to increase your employees’ proficiency. You and your employees are expected to enter these conversations willing to listen and learn. Many people dread performance reviews because they feel overcritical, but your employees will approach performance reviews positively if you clarify your intentions to help them grow.
While most feedback targets areas needing improvement, positive feedback should also be given to encourage positive behavior. Acknowledge and applaud the actions that garner positive results. This appreciation will ease stress and show you are there to help, instead of simply pointing out everything they need to work on.
Use an informal tone to relieve tension, but be assertive in addressing and solving issues. Avoid judgmental language and practice compassion to gain your staff’s trust and support.
Keep It Private
Feedback should always be given in private. Private conversations reduce discomfort for both those receiving and providing feedback. Hold a personal meeting and assure confidentiality to alleviate pressure and have an honest discussion.
Even positive feedback should be given privately. Some people don’t like being the center of attention, even when praised. Public criticism and appraisal can make the recipient and those around them uncomfortable.
Consider offering written feedback to those who struggle with face-to-face confrontations. Written feedback allows you to reflect and compose a more thoughtful and thorough review, but ensure you provide time and space for them to respond.
Be Direct
The purpose of feedback is to help your employees improve. There is no need to sugarcoat criticism as this often creates uncertainty for employees about how to improve.
You may have heard of the “sandwich” approach, where you provide praise before and after a critique. This technique is meant to soften the harshness of the critique, but instead, it reduces the employee’s ability to recognize negative feedback.
Employees understand the nature of performance reviews. They often brace themselves for critiques after hearing a compliment, and the sandwiched compliments seem insincere as they are only there to soften the critique.
A more effective approach to ease the sting of criticism is to provide solutions. Directness may be more uncomfortable for the deliverer, but being direct and transparent with feedback promotes authenticity and trust.

Be Open To Conversation
Performance reviews aren’t lectures—they shouldn’t be heavily one-sided but productive back-and-forth. Many people think performance reviews are simply for management to spill their thoughts, but employees should be shown respect and be involved in the feedback process.
Opening the floor to conversation is much more effective in creating solutions than telling them what you expect them to do. Introduce the issue and your observations, then let them respond with their interpretation and ask questions. Once the situation is clear, work together to find the best way to proceed.
Dialogue is a healthy way to address behaviors and present opportunities for improvement, even for management. Allow employees to provide feedback on your management style and how your behavior may hinder their work. Ensure there is enough time for you and your employee to speak together.
Focus On Performance
When providing feedback, it’s important to focus on an employee’s work behavior and not their personality. Don’t comment on a person’s character but on how their actions affect business operations.
Being personal makes people defensive and less receptive to feedback. Specify their actions rather than target their character. People are unlikely to change their personality after a review, but they can address individual actions.
Follow Up
Performance feedback conversations aren’t individual events but rather ongoing topics of discussion. Improvements take time to implement, so results cannot be expected right away. Follow up with your employees and acknowledge any improvements to show your support and maintain high motivation.
While follow-ups are important, don’t be overbearing. Give your team time to implement change. Checking in on your employees strengthens your bond and the company’s organizational culture.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Meant by Performance Feedback?
Performance feedback assesses an employee’s work and behavior during a specific period and is meant to address and improve inefficient practices. While performance feedback is often critical, it also acknowledges positive employee behavior.
What Is Positive Performance Feedback?
Positive performance feedback acknowledges and applauds an employee’s good work. This feedback is as important as criticism as it relaxes employees and encourages them to produce similarly positive results.
Final Thoughts
Performance reviews are an effective way to keep employee morale up and increase productivity. Effective feedback gives your staff room to grow and cuts out inefficient behavior.
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