Drive Employee Performance Using Feedback

One of the most desirable and sort after qualities of a good leader is an ability to motivate their people to put in additional discretionary effort in support of organizational goals. Every now and then a new best selling book appears offering a creative fix for poor employee motivation.

Of the people who buy these books only a small percentage read the book and of those few will deliver any improvement in morale leading to an improvement in employee performance.

Good leaders do not look for a quick fix for employee motivation; instead they embrace a holistic performance management system that prioritizes leader behavior in areas that will deliver meaning full improvements in both morale and employee performance.

There are eight key drivers of employee performance that when incorporated in to your performance management system will result in an improvement in your employee engagement, or morale, by up to 20 percentage points.

The driver with the greatest potential to improve employee morale, or engagement, is for the leader to provide regular informal performance feedback to their people, ensuring the feedback is both fair and accurate.

Define Informal Feedback?

Informal feedback is the feedback that you provide to your employees incidentally throughout the day, often triggered by employee cues, such as overhearing an employee dealing professionally with a difficult customer, when the employee is finished you acknowledge the way they handled the situation.

When giving informal feedback look for opportunities to give positive feedback to your employees who are performing well or have improved recently, developed a new skill, shown commitment to the organizations values. Recognizing teamwork, initiative or risk taking are excellent things to provide feedback on.

Understanding fair?

Being fair is a complex criteria to understand and achieve, not only must the feedback be fair to the person you are giving the feedback to it must also be fair to the rest of your people.

A leader who gives informal feedback to an employee for completing a project without recognizing those who helped might be judged as unfair. Though, the leader will also be judged as unfair if they do not give positive recognition through fear of leaving someone out.

The risk of being unfair through omission can be mitigated if the leader gives lots of informal feedback, the more you give the less people will notice an omission and when they do any negative feelings will have a shorter life.

When giving positive informal feedback you can do this in a public forum however, any negative feedback must be completed in private.

How to be accurate?

Any feedback needs to be accurate; if you are not accurate with your feedback you will risk loosing the respect of your team, to be accurate with informal feedback you will need to be knowledgeable about your employee’s current performance.

Management tips:

1. The more personal your feedback the greater the impact.

a. An email saying well done has half the impact of a phone call, email is not as personal as a conversation

b. A phone call to say well done has half the impact of face to face recognition

2. Informal feedback can be in the form of another manager contacting your employee to seek information on how they achieved a specific outcome. (You need to set this up).

3 .A good leader promotes the value of their employees broadly in the organization and talks up their employee capabilities. In addition to promoting the value of your employees, get other leaders in the organization to also provide recognition for big achievements.

See the difference

By embracing the concept of giving regular, fair and accurate, informal feedback to your employees you will be encouraging your employees to believe in the value they add an in doing so you will ensure that your employees feel valued.
When your employees feel valued they will respond with higher level of commitment to the organizations goals, their personal performance will improve and the level of teamwork will increase.

A holistic performance management system will include all eight key drivers of employee performance. The single largest driver of employee performance is the leader providing regular, fair and accurate informal feedback to their employees.