Hey Boss! You are in charge! You’ve built an incredible vision, turned it into a reality, hired a strong team, established SOPs, and now you are hitting your monthly and yearly goals which is absolutely incredible. But how do you continue to nurture that powerhouse of a team so that your team receives the feedback they need to continue making positive progress? 

Feedback can be difficult because most people believe that feedback means criticism and that criticism means negative. However, this is not always the case! Today we are excited to share 5 steps to keeping your employee feedback positive so that your incredible team can continue to be even stronger than it was this morning.

1. Don’t Wait to Share Feedback

Nobody likes to be called out on the spot or after it is far too late. It can be crushing, frustrating, and embarrassing for your employee to know that something has been bothering you for quite some time and you haven’t addressed it. They deserve your respect, so speak your mind about an issue as it occurs, not well after the fact or after you’ve re-delegated the work to someone else. 

2. Be Consistent with Your Response

Set regular check-ins with your team members so that you can connect one-on-one. Yes, one-on-one where there isn’t the attention of a full group. These can be as short as 15 minutes if that is all your schedule allows and can be as frequently as once a week or less. Use this time to connect face to face so that you can: connect on things your employee needs from you, share things that you need from your employee, and provide feedback on the current workflow occurring. Trust us when we say that a face to face will be much more positive than a missed tone in a quick email. 

3. Be Specific when Reporting

Feedback should never be “Clean this up” or “Make this more unique” or “Can you approach this with fresh eyes?” Nobody knows what that means and it makes it incredibly difficult for the employee to improve it. Think back to high school for a moment when you were assigned an essay. You were given a rubric of specific tasks necessary to achieve the goal. Without it, you may have completely missed the mark because you had zero direction to guide you. By frontloading the conversation with specific feedback, there can be room for growth and a clearer understanding of expectations moving forward.

4. Find the Balance

There is a huge misconception that feedback is a bad thing. Many think it means that you messed up, need criticism, or aren’t good at what you are tackling. This is a myth! Feedback is and NEEDS to be a balance of both strengths and areas of improvement. If your employee is only ever hearing about what she needs to improve, she may begin to believe that she is never right and not doing well in her job. In order to keep the conversation positive and yield better results, you will want to be sure that you always highlight things that are going well too! This boosts morale and encourages your employee to work even harder. 

5. Follow Up

Feedback is only so good if you circle back to it. When you provide meaningful feedback to an employee, set a reminder to check in about it in the future. Reanalyzing the information you shared to see how your employee took it and ran with it is incredibly meaningful! If she took your advice and hit the mark…she should know because you should tell her. If she didn’t, you can find a way to more clearly define the expectation so that your relationship can remain strong and your employee can be set up for success.

Feedback is a critical component of building positive relationships in the workplace. It is necessary for growth and can make a world of a difference when setting goals as a team. By following these five steps, you can ensure that the feedback you give is not only positive but it yields positive results too! Way to go Boss, you’ve got this!

Still looking for help?

At The Abundance Group, our passion is building teams. Scratch that…not just teams…positive, healthy, thriving teams! A huge part of that success is feedback. If you want to learn more about how you can build your team, check it out HERE.