Employee Feedback: Your Key to Satisfied Employees
Suppose you had your choice of three meal plans for one week … which would you choose?
Plan #1: No food from Sunday morning through Saturday afternoon. But for Saturday dinner, you must eat a lavish 5-course meal.
Plan #2: Each day you can have donuts for breakfast, your choice from the company’s snack vending machine for lunch, and greasy fast food on the way home.
Plan #3: Each day, you can have a healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
With Plan #1, you’ll starve. Plan #2 will leave you unhealthy and fatigued. Only with Plan #3 will you have energy and strength to work and live - and enjoy both.
Just as your body needs regular, nutritious feeding to be healthy, your employees need regular, effective feedback to reach their highest potential. Yet in the corporate environment, leaders often feed their employees on the equivalent of Plan #1 or Plan #2 …… and then wonder why they fail to perform.
8 Reasons Why Employee Feedback Backfires
Many times, leaders, managers, and executives give up on providing employee feedback because it has backfired on them. Why is that the case? Why does feedback so often backfire? Here are eight of the top causes:
1. Feedback that is indirect.
People often go the long way around the mulberry bush when it comes to giving feedback. They talk about everything except the real issue. For example, suppose that Bob’s emails to a vendor are unclear. As a result, the vendor has made mistakes in fulfillment. The manager comes to Bob:
Manager: Bob, I’m really concerned because the client is getting on us about these mistakes from our vendor. My VP has gotten calls directly about this and has insisted that we achieve a minimum accuracy rating of 95%. You need to improve your liaison skills to make sure that fulfillment runs smoothly.
4 Bad Reasons not to Give Employee Feedback
Feedback is perhaps the single most powerful tool a leader has at his or her disposal to bring about significant improvement in levels of employee engagement and performance. Ken Blanchard wisely noted that “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
The positive outcomes of giving effective feedback are astonishing and oftentimes bring about company-wide improvements. Effective feedback can increase productivity and sales, decrease conflict, streamline business processes, uncover training needs, and improve problem-solving abilities. And that is just the beginning.
If feedback can do all that for us, why don’t more leaders use it? Here are the top four reasons I have discovered in my work with companies of all sizes. Do any apply to you?
Reason #1: “Why should I?”
The first reason, “Why should I?” is most often given when we are talking about reinforcing feedback: that is, feedback that recognizes a job well done, and seeks to encourage repeat behavior.