Is Employee Feedback Missing at Your Company? Here's Why and How to Fix It.

Employees want to know how they’re doing, and giving them feedback is the best way to keep them informed. However, a new study from Leadership IQ found that fewer than half of employees surveyed knew whether they weredoing a good job. With the increased focus today on HR technology and performance analytics, just the opposite should be true.

So, what’s going wrong with this picture? Here are three of the biggestreasons employees still aren’t getting the performance feedback they need and what managers and HR can do to help:

1. Reluctant Delivery

Managers are overly cautious when it comes time to give constructive feedback because they think employees will react badly to what they have to say. But the absence of feedbackisn't necessarilya matter of negativity-- it’s a matter of delivery.

Zenger Folkman的2014反馈: 对2,700雇主和雇员进行的一项强有力的悖论研究发现，接受调查的72% 员工表示，如果他们的经理提供纠正反馈，他们的表现将会提高。 Additionally, 92 percent of the respondents agreed with the assertion, “Negative (redirecting) feedback, if delivered appropriately, is effective at improving performance.”

Employees, then, desire redirecting feedback, but managers still feel uncomfortable providing it.

The 2015 Many Leaders Shrink from Straight Talk with Employees report from Interact addressed this conundrum. Itfound that 37 percent of the 616 managers surveyed said they were uncomfortable having to give direct feedback and criticism about anemployee’s performance that that inpidual might respond badly to. Clearly, managers need direction when it comes to delivering feedback.

提示: Empower your company's managers with development and coaching on how to deliver constructive feedback the right way. That means focusing on the situation and the performance of the employee, not on the employee himself or herself. When providing feedback, managers should be forward-thinking and offer solutions and advice for the employee to progress. The best tool to provide the most impactful feedback? Real-time performance data.

2. Underutilized Technology

The introduction of advanced technology and talent-management platforms has permanently changed HR --especially the way employees relate with their employers and managers. plus, it’s the best tool for improving performance. So, why aren’t companies embracing it?

The Global Workforce Leadership Survey from Workplace Trends, and Saba, released in March 2015, found that 58 percent of companies surveyed werestill using spreadsheets as their primary means fortracking performance metrics, according to the 700 leaders surveyed. What’s more, less than a quarter of businesses worldwide were using technology to capture and developinsights about their people and about the effectiveness of their talent programs.

提示: The solution is simple -- get with the times! Various tools and technologies exist that empower HR with important performance stats. These metrics can inform impactful discussions about employee performance and equip leaders to follow up and track how employees use the constructive input.

Companies that invest in these revolutionary HR technologies need to use them wisely. Make the real-time performance-tracking accessible to all levels of employees. This way, they can see how they’re progressing across various projects, where they can improve and how they’re measuring up to expectations. This kind of information will allow them to perform accurate self-assessments -- an important practice that can be used during formal reviews.

3. Untimely formal reviews

The Global Workforce Leadership Survey also found that 52 percent of all companies still conduct annual performance reviews. 58003 Employees don’t know if they’re doing their jobs well.

Empowering HR and managers with talent-management solutions that measure how well employees are performing gives employers the opportunity to fix issues in the moment. It’s proactive, not reactive. How can employees get better if they’re waiting a whole year before they find out what they’re doing wrong or right?

提示: Make more time for frequent one-on-one check-ins. 58003 Formal evaluations don’t need to happen on a weekly basis, but more casual performance feedback can, and should, be given in a timely manner. 好消息: The time invested in regular check-ins means time saved on elaborate performance improvement plans or talent replacement searches.

Supplement regular formal reviews with casual sit-downs where leadership can show employees their performance in real time, which is helpful for both parties involved. 58003

When employees can visualize how they’re performing at that exact moment, they are more engaged and feel more accountable for their actions and decisions. When that happens, too, performance will soar, job satisfaction will rise and turnover will drop.This is the formula for a high-performance company that empowers its staff members to do their best work.