FEEDBACK AND PERFORMANCE

Business leaders want employees to succeed. Employees are an integral component of the overall business' success. Plus when employees succeed, they have a more positive demeanor and everyone enjoys being at the office more when people are happy. Performance feedback is critical to helping employees understand expectations, make adjustments and get the coaching necessary to improve and succeed. On the other side of the equation is feedback managers may receive in the process as well that helps them more effectively lead the organization.

Define Performance Feedback

Performance feedback is a communications process. It should be ongoing meaning as adjustments are made based on the information exchanged between manager and team member. There should be regular follow up dialogue to determine success. Feedback is designed to note where things are going right and where they are going wrong. This means that leaders may need to be patient as new habits get developed and the learning curves for new skills are overcome.

Performance feedback is useless unless business leaders have standards for performance, meaning they should have expectations of reasonable achievement. For example, a car dealership may set the standard as 10 sales per month. An accounting office might set the standard of meeting with three clients per day. Without these standards, a manager is unable to take a baseline level of productivity and make adjustments.

When it comes to adjustments, leaders need to get the feedback from the team member before they can provide new goals and tasks for improvement. The employee unable to meet 10 car sales per month might be struggling because he is not getting scheduled for the prime sales periods. In most cases, the only way a manager can provide effective feedback is to be among the team. A sports coach

can't provide productive feedback without seeing a player do his job. The feedback from the team member is as important as the feedback the manager provides. In fact, it is how the manager is able to fully understand the situation and make the right adjustment rather than just guess and what might solve a problem.

How Feedback Improves Performance

Every athlete uses performance feedback to improve performance. This area of study has expanded how athletes use coaches, camera recordings, bio-feedback and other tools to get the right feedback. A tennis player and his coach might use a tracker implanted in his racket to get swing speeds while hitting a ball. This information is then used with statistics of accuracy and the coaches experience in seeing the small details in a swing that affect performance. The ultimate goal is to improve accuracy and consistency to win more matches.

The feedback definition in management is not very different. The goal of performance feedback is to improve skills and generate more revenues. When a team member gets feedback on how his word choices may negatively affect customers with new ideas on how to convey the same message, he is put in a position to make more customers happy. Ironically, the change will probably reduce consistent conflict he experiences with customers improving his overall job satisfaction.

It's hard to change something if you are unaware of what you are doing wrong. This is most true with behavioral adjustments but holds true for detail-oriented tasks and processes as well. Someone who is taking too long to complete a client intake form might not realize a very simple trick on his keyboard that toggles him from screen to screen saving him minutes per intake form. The old adage, "You don't know what you don't know," is resolved with performance feedback. People learn what gaps they have and are able to adjust saving time, money and often frustration.

Examples of Feedback

Performance feedback can cover any area of business operations. Think about the job duties of any one employee and you will be able to determine the performance feedback metrics for that person.

Quality of Work: This is a fundamental responsibility that employees need to get right. If someone's job is to complete a client's tax return and it is riddled with errors, this is a problem for the company and the client. If this s a regular problem, it needs to be addressed. Feedback would include rating the quality of work, perhaps on a scale of one to five and noting the good and the bad to include regular mistakes.

Work Habits: This is an area of performance feedback that doesn't always seem like it affects performance but it does. Being on time, dependable and organized seems like arbitrary performance items. But if someone isn't at work, they are unable to help customers and other employees get burdened with additional duties. A person who isn't organized might spend an extra 10 minutes looking for a report thus arrives late to a meeting creating a negative tone from the start.

Service Habits: These habits affect how the outside views the competence of your company and a desire to want to work with you. If an employee is not returning phone calls, rude or passes the buck to others, customers will have a negative experience and it will also strain employee relationships. Feedback in this area would include creating systems to make time for service issues and training on communication skills.

Team Skills: Some people work better in groups than others. There are those who get huge levels of anxiety leaving the safety of their cubicles. Helping your team understand how to work with each other, to help each other and support each other is critical to preventing miscommunication or production slow-downs. If someone with a strong personality is constantly criticizing the person who is very introverted, your feedback may revolve around communication skills and inclusion ideas. By bringing the two parties together with less anxiety, productivity can improve for both.

When a manager sees a problematic area in any part of the organization, it behooves him to start the conversation and get employee input to develop a performance feedback action plan.

Feedback Best Practices

How feedback improves performance depends on how it is given. When feedback is overly critical, employees might tune out the feedback because they are focused on the negative. No one likes to be criticized. Feedback given in an overly friendly way might not result in change because the employee might not perceive it as important. As with any other system in your business, create a process for performance feedback.

Standards: Determine what is normal for the performance item in question. Set expectations so employees know the standards of performance. Sales numbers are easy to define metrics but other performance items are not as easily defined. Take the time to look at the activities involved with any performance item and establish realistic parameters. This could be accomplished by looking at other employees and getting their input or by doing the task yourself to determine what is reasonable.

Constructive Language: Use constructive language when providing performance feedback. This goes back to the point that people don't like to be criticized and will often block out any information coming with that criticism. An easy way to be constructive is to include the well-executed activities while addressing the poorly executed ones.

Consistency: Be consistent with all employees. If employees feel they are being singled out, it feels like an attack and personal. At the same time, if you only do performance feedback when things are going poorly in the organization, you are not fulfilling the purpose of on-going conversations and missing opportunities to fix things before the problem becomes exaggerated. Hold regular performance feedback sessions with all employees and be open to new ideas and thoughts being brought up in good times and bad.

It can be hard to give feedback, especially negative feedback. But with practice and paying attention to language and tone, you will positively impact your organization. If performance feedback is presented in a way that an athlete seeks to improve rather than a grade a teacher is giving, both managers and team leaders have the right mindset going in.

Accepting Performance Feedback

Taking feedback as a leader is as important as giving it. It was discussed earlier that you are able to get insights from employees as to why performance might not be successful. You can also derive important procedural problems from employees who are doing the work every day. Sometimes leadership isn't able to see the tree in the middle of the forest. This is why performance feedback involves a two-way line of communication.

Being open to feedback is also important in understanding how your leadership style affects your team. There are many leadership styles ranging from authoritarian to affiliative. No one is 100% of any one leadership style and when a leader can adapt based on the situation or the team member; he gets better results from happier employees. If an employee says that he fears going over the data numbers in team meetings because he isn't a top performer, you might choose to find ways to recognize employees for different things in group settings. Acknowledging the employee's difficulty and feelings validate the employee as an important part of the team and show your willingness to see their strengths.

Feedback Integration in Operations

Feedback performance does absolutely nothing if you are not going to integrate changes based on feedback and evaluation. You may find yourself providing the same performance feedback and tweaks

to several people; this is a training issue on you as a manager. While you can correct this through performance feedback one team member at a time, you could improve your own productivity by better training people so they don't make the same mistakes across the board.

There are other times where you may change something in how your business operates based on performance feedback. If you find that employees are not reaching customers earlier in the morning, you could change office hours to start later thus giving employees more time to reach customers. Instead of changing office hours, you may re-arrange daily activities to give employees the opportunity to succeed.

Takeaways of Performance Feedback

Managers and team members might be reluctant to start a new program that takes a lot of time away from actually doing work. Implementing performance feedback doesn't need to be a huge time commitment. Set a time weekly to monitor and talk to employees. Prepare standard forms to simplify the recording process and let employees know what to expect. These are evaluations determining employment status but a method for everyone to improve.

How you explain and approach performance evaluations will determine how your employees respond. You will find most people want to do a good job and are eager to improve with feedback. When done right performance feedback eventually relies less on documenting information and simple conversations that happen throughout a workday or week. Employees will also be more likely to approach you with problems they are experiencing hoping you have a solution.