Your Employees Need Feedback

"If you have ideas and information that will help someone perform better; it's hostile not to share them."Anne Saunier

Your team isn't improving fast enough. You see the same mistakes, the same bottlenecks, month after month. The problem isn't a lack of effort; it's a lack of real feedback.

You expect your team to drive projects and deliver results. Yet, many companies still rely on annual or semi-annual reviews. That’s not feedback; it’s an autopsy. Often, there’s no feedback at all.

Owners and managers often avoid pointing out shortcomings. Maybe they don’t know how to help. Maybe they fear a negative reaction. Or they just assume employees already know their weaknesses and how to fix them. Today’s work is also more team-oriented, making individual performance harder to pinpoint.

Bill Gates put it plainly in a TED talk: “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” He shared a stark example:

"When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get; we were blown away. Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory,' I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?"

How to give good feedback?

Feedback is an ongoing discipline

Your team complains about reviews happening too late. They're right. If you want people and processes to improve, you can't wait six months or a year. You need to give feedback as it happens. A review delivered months after the fact isn't feedback. It's history.

A form won’t give the feedback your employees need

Many companies implement evaluation forms to document that a review happened — often for legal reasons. They aren't using these forms as a tool to actually evaluate employees.

Don’t assume your peers realize you are giving them feedback

Your team might misinterpret your feedback. They could think it's just a casual chat. Don't let that happen. Start the conversation directly: "Here's some feedback." Make sure the other person knows you're assessing their work. Otherwise, they'll still wait for a formal review.

Promotions or salary increases don’t count as feedback either. Employees need to know what they did to earn it. They also need to know what to improve to keep moving up.

You either give positive or negative feedback, but you cannot mix them

Many managers mix positive and negative feedback. They think it makes the criticism easier to swallow. Roger Schwarz calls this the "sandwich approach": a negative review tucked between two positive ones. If you use this technique, you're not giving feedback on time. You're waiting until you can build a sandwich.

Positive or negative feedback works best when you share it quickly. The positive comments you use to cushion the blow often sound fake. They lose their genuine impact.

Reward others publicly, but deliver criticism in private

No one wants public humiliation, especially in front of their peers. When managers shame employees, it hits the business hard. Christine Porath and Christine Pearson, writing in HBR, found that over 50% of employees who feel their boss criticizes them too harshly intentionally cut their productivity.