Upgrade your feedback path

When have you ever seen a sports field without a scoreboard? No matter what kind of official competition they are participating in, the athlete must always know the score after the hard work on the field. Too often, however, employees of various organizations operate without a "scoreboard" in sight. This is both a problem and an opportunity—an opportunity to improve employee performance in a powerful way by providing feedback.

Feedback is information about an employee's job performance that an employee uses to improve work outcomes and improve work processes. It helps employees improve performance, which is what feedback is for. But a lot of feedback in the workplace doesn't do that, and they don't help employees make their jobs better.

Criteria for Effective Feedback

Feedback must enable employees to learn. It can be as simple as letting employees themselves seek improvements based on feedback, or it can be a more complex way of helping employees learn to improve their workflow. Affirming a work method and its outcomes in the form of feedback can also encourage employees to learn and they will continue to work that way.

Useful feedback is information that clearly identifies the strengths and weaknesses of work methods and results. The more clearly a piece of feedback is about the job, the more valuable it is for improving the quality of work and inspiring a desire to succeed in employees.

What must be done to make feedback effective? How to ensure that employees receive effective feedback, so that they can more clearly see the connection between their work methods and work results, and improve their own performance more easily? One of the best ways is that the feedback must maximize task clarity. Task clarity refers to how well you can see the connection between your method of work and the outcome of your work. A specific, accurate, informative, and controllable feedback provides employees with maximum task clarity. Concrete means that the employee can relate the feedback to recognizable behavior; accurate means the feedback can help the employee to gain insight; and informative means that the feedback can help the employee gain insight into how to do it differently and better Work; the so-called controllable means that the behavior corresponding to the feedback is the ability of the employee to change.

For example, if you tell an employee that he promised a customer on the phone last time that he would go and find a piece of information for them and let them know, but then he forgot to follow up on it. Since it is the employee's responsibility to get this done, he may also come up with better ways to keep track of and live on those commitments, so for him this feedback is very specific and accurate, giving him relevant information, and is within his control. So the feedback you give him makes the task clearer and he sees the connection between job performance and job outcomes more clearly. This type of feedback helps employees gain a clearer picture of their job performance.

Three Levels of Feedback

Level 1: Balancing the effects of negative and positive feedback. Level 2: Convert control feedback to information feedback. Level 3: Work with employees to design feedback systems (participatory feedback).

Level 1: Balance the effects of negative and positive feedback. It's easy for managers to fall into a behavioral pattern where they pay little attention to employee performance until something goes wrong. From the employee's point of view, they feel that their boss is always there when they do something wrong -- and then hits them with negative feedback.

Take Ralph, who just arrived as a salesperson for a high-tech company. Because the company's products are very complex, and he doesn't know much about the industry, so many things are messed up. But he's trying his best to do the job, and he's spending a lot of time doing it. His boss was very busy, but since she felt that she should have cared more about Ralph in his early days, she began to check Ralph's sales performance, asking Ralph about the more important ones at least once a week. customer's situation. Over the past two months, she has documented the problems and mistakes she finds to help Ralph correct them. Ralph felt that his boss was dissatisfied with his job and doubted that he was not suitable for the job. He was discouraged and had no motivation to work. All because - in his opinion - the boss is not satisfied with his job. That's the problem with negative feedback, and in light of this, it's important to balance the negative effects of negative feedback with positive feedback.

You don't really need to instruct each of your employees in detail, and they certainly don't want you to pay attention to their every move. In fact, in a healthy organization, feedback from managers should be minimal. Most feedback should come from feedback systems and "scoreboards" that you set up or help employees build so they can monitor their own performance.

Level 2: Converts control feedback to informative feedback. The traditional type of feedback is controlling because it often relies on the judgment of the manager, and the employee only decides whether to "stop" or "continue" based on the feedback of the boss. In other words, this type of feedback is used to control performance, not motivate it. The opposite of control feedback is information feedback. This type of feedback provides employees with enough information to judge for themselves whether the work is being done well or poorly. This type of feedback transmits the information managers use to make judgments about employee performance directly to employees, allowing them to better assess their own performance. Informative feedback shifts the responsibility for decision-making from managers to employees. This can stimulate the internal motivation of employees, make them more energetic, and as a boss, you can do something more valuable.

If you are in charge of a regional audit department at an accounting firm, you have staff that do the audit and produce reports for clients. As a manager, you pay close attention to the quality of their work and try to make sure that all work is done on time. You often review the report and correct errors, while also asking a lot of questions. Sometimes, you have to point out to employees that a client has been waiting for a long time and they have to rush through the report at hand. In other words, when something goes wrong with your employees, you provide them with negative feedback. To balance the emotional impact of negative feedback, you'll try to congratulate them when they do a good job.

But how can you change your feedback to employees from controlling to informative, to encourage them to identify errors in their reports and improve their productivity? For employees who are new to this job, instead of specifying the errors in the report, give them a list of errors that you will often find in the report, and have them respond to this before submitting the report to you. list to look for errors in it. Giving employees a list of common mistakes and telling them how to identify them is a powerful example of informative feedback.

Second, you can also count the number of occurrences and changes of each type of error in the audit report, and use it as a reference to understand how serious employees are in writing the audit report. Third, you could also have employees keep track of the time they spent writing each audit report, maybe you could set the completion time of each audit report accordingly (for example, two weeks), or let them do it themselves Check how many reports have exceeded this time limit.

Level 3: Work with employees to design feedback systems. For most managers, moving from the first level of feedback (the right mix of positive and negative feedback) to the second level of feedback (more information, less control) is a big step. Both employees and managers have to put in a lot of effort and repeated practice to do it well. Sometimes, at least until you figure out how to deliver scoreboard-style information to your employees, the feedback method in Level 1 is your best bet. Why go to the next level?

Because you'll find that while you're used to giving your employees more informative feedback and employees rely less on your judgment, they may still rely heavily on the information you provide. In order to make them more independent and stimulate their inner work motivation, you need to establish such an information system on which employees can derive their own informational feedback. As a manager, you will find it worthwhile to create a feedback system from which employees can derive information about their own performance and keep track of it. The third level of feedback methods can make employees more independent and stimulate their inner work motivation.