One key way of ensuring your team members have the tools and knowledge to do their jobs to the best of their abilities is to provide them with plenty of feedback. But between busy schedules and stressful projects, leaders may think it too difficult to find the time. So while many employees may be eager to receive more feedback from their leadership, companies aren’t necessarily providing it.
However, giving honest, constructive feedback or praise doesn’t have to take up a lot of time—nor be relegated to once-a-year performance reviews. Here, eight members of Young Entrepreneur Council discuss specific ways managers can create more opportunities for feedback during their employees’ workdays and why these methods are so effective.
Young Entrepreneur Council members discuss tips for incorporating more feedback into the workday.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Address Something The Moment It Happens
It sounds simplistic, but if you see something, say something. It takes less than two minutes to give someone public praise on Slack for a job well done or to give constructive feedback. Leaders are moving fast, which is why they are prone to forgetting to give employees decent feedback. Address something the moment it happens. You don’t have to wait for a formal review to address something. – Trivinia Barber, PriorityVA
2. Have An Open-Door Policy
Encourage your team to communicate with you without any hesitation. This would create more opportunities for you to assess assigned work and provide feedback. People are often reluctant to share in general meetings or in front of everyone. With an open-door policy, your team knows that they can reach out to you at any time, and you get to review their deliverables on an as-needed basis. This also facilitates the sharing of ideas and helps you devise effective strategies. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
3. Conduct One-On-One Meetings
One-on-one meetings are a great way to connect with your team and give feedback. You can set the frequency of these meetings per your preferences—weekly, every two weeks or monthly. People also generally avoid feedback in the presence of others. We switch on a defensive mode if our work gets critiqued in front of our peers or colleagues. So, feedback should be given in private. One-on-one meetings would create more opportunities not only for you to give feedback but also for your team to reflect upon the suggestions provided and come up with the right solutions. – Jared Atchison, WPForms
4. Work It Into Informal Conversation
I think a great way to encourage more feedback is to make it less formal. You don’t need to wait for a scheduled meeting or annual review to give feedback. Instead, try to have more informal conversations about someone’s work. This could be done over lunch, in the hallway or even via email. The key is to make it less formal and more frequent. This way, employees will feel like they can openly discuss their work and receive feedback on a regular basis. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
5. Make Feedback Part Of The Culture
Having feedback as part of your team—and preferably the overall company—culture is best. At our company, we promote an open and transparent culture where we actively encourage people to ask questions openly, challenge ideas and feel comfortable enough to approach their manager with feedback requests. With an open-door policy, your team members will come to you for feedback rather than leaving things unsaid. – Andy Karuza, NachoNacho
6. Develop A Regular Meeting Cadence
Whether it’s daily huddles, weekly one-to-one meetings, monthly team meetings or quarterly reviews, having a cadence of ongoing meetings provides consistent feedback. In our daily huddles, we nip time-sensitive issues in the bud, and in team meetings, we discuss things that can wait a few weeks and generally have to do with efficiency in processes and workflows. Our weekly one-to-one meetings have topics of discussion like: What have you been most proud of in the last X days?; What could you have done differently looking in the rearview mirror?; What do you want to get done in your personal and professional life in the next 90 days? Leaders in our firm also have a rule to praise publicly and criticize privately. This applies to these meetings, electronic communications and Slack. – Givelle Lamano, Lamano Law Office
7. Leverage Online Forms
Managers can create more opportunities for employee feedback by simply including a form on their website. We invite our employees to share their thoughts with us whenever a situation arises. We check the responses daily and make sure our employees know that we value their voices by responding to their feedback and taking action. – John Turner, SeedProd LLC
8. Encourage Employees To Reach Out
We encourage everyone who works with our company to reach out to a supervisor if they want feedback on their current assignment or performance. I believe that opening up this line of transparency—then following through—is why this strategy has worked for our business. Our team members know that if they ever want to know how to improve, all they have to do is message us on Slack and set up a one-on-one meeting. – John Brackett, Smash Balloon LLC