In an ideal world, no one has to “force” feedback. Employees, managers, and even leadership, openly share thoughts and ideas on how to make work better.
But a feedback culture doesn’t happen overnight. And you can’t afford to let draconian performance reviews force good people out of the company, especially when you may not be able to replace them.
In this guide, we’ll explore five essential elements to an employee feedback system that allows for open communication and ongoing exchange, without skimping on depth or quality.
What is an employee feedback system?
An employee feedback system is a process used by companies to gather, give, and receive employee feedback to improve employee satisfaction, identify areas of improvement, and support employees in achieving their development goals. The system can be formal or informal and typically involves multiple methods of collecting feedback, such as employee engagement surveys, check-ins, and 360 team assessments.
5 essential elements for an effective employee feedback system
An effective employee feedback system covers goal setting, check-ins, feedback, recognition, and employee engagement. Let’s unpack each key area to help you design a program that gathers employee feedback and allows everyone to feel heard.
1. A clear process for goal setting
In the 2020s, goal setting isn’t an annual benchmarking exercise used to “separate the wheat from the chaff”. For companies like Microsoft, Netflix and more, it’s about setting mutually beneficial targets backed by clear expectations for how goals are accomplished.
Here are some of the latest best practices to keep in mind.
Clarify the purpose
Why are you setting goals in the first place? Help employees understand what’s in it for them by offering examples of how their work supports the organization’s broader goals and initiatives, including how their individual objectives relate to others on the team.
Make it clear to both your employees and managers (but especially your managers), that structured performance evaluations shouldn’t just cover what the individual did, but also what the team accomplished, and how the individual employee performance contributed to that outcome.
If you’re using a performance management tool that offers goal tracking at the company, department and individual level, you can use easy-to-follow visual dashboards to keep your entire team in sync on shared progress.
Set clear expectations
Work with employees to set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Then decide where in the performance management lifecycle you’ll check in on progress.
Whether you’ll be reviewing employee goals during your weekly employee check-ins, or through a quarterly or annual review process, be transparent about the feedback mechanisms you’ll use to measure their progress. Make it clear whether you’ll be approaching the conversation from a strictly “business” perspective, company culture perspective, or both.
“[H]ow actually is a performance metric,” says HR expert Josh Bersin. “If you're doing a great job of hitting your numbers, but making everybody else miserable, maybe you shouldn't get such a high review,” he explained in a recent interview with KQED.
Align your feedback mechanisms to the principles your company values most, then make sure those expectations are regularly discussed and upheld by both managers and employees.
Provide employee feedback tools and resources
Research by Stanford’s Justin Berg suggests job satisfaction is highest when employees experience dual growth in both personal skills and job description.
One way to engage employees on both levels is to provide continuous feedback, access to regular training, and performance management tools to help them recognize patterns in their own professional growth.
“It takes deliberate effort to not get stuck in the day-to-day grind at work. Every once in a while, we need to take a step back and think hard about how we might be able to change ourselves and our jobs to better suit one another,” says Justin Berg in an article for Stanford.
Monitor progress
How will you monitor progress towards shared and individual goals? Your feedback collection system can include any combination of regular check-ins, 360 reviews, peer reviews, pulse surveys, self-assessments, and more.
Clarify when each type of review will be implemented, when a goal is considered complete, and steps for setting new goals based on what you’re learning. Last, but in no way least, don’t forget to celebrate completed goals and acknowledge each employee’s efforts in making them happen.
2. A systematized feedback loop
Whether you know it or not, you already have a feedback process.
However formal or informal it is, it’s important to identify and systemize that feedback model so that each and every person on your team has the right information at the right time.
Here are some of the most common and effective feedback flows:
- Manager to employee (M-E): This traditional approach helps direct reports assess progress on their current projects and how they can improve.
- Employee to manager (E-M): Upwards feedback helps managers boost their mentoring skills, improve teamwork, and learn how they can better support employees.
- Peer to peer (P-P): Constructive feedback from teammates and cross-functional colleagues helps employees collaborate better on projects and leads to a more productive work environment.
When you need a broader perspective, 360-degree feedback can help. This type of feedback can be especially useful after key milestones, such as:
- Deals closed
- Customer renewal or expansion
- New market launch
- New partnership launch
- New product launch
- Updates and improvements to products or processes
Of course, a continuous improvement feedback loop in a software engineering team will look very different from that of a healthcare team.
Whether you need to align following a shift in responsibilities, or track past feedback for focused quarterly check-ins, you can save yourself a ton of time by centralizing your feedback data in an employee feedback software platform that both managers and employees can access as needed.
3. Regular reviews and check-Ins
If increased retention and an elevated employee experience are the goals, having a consistent schedule for delivering both positive and negative feedback is critical.
Data from Gallup found that employees were 3.6x more likely to strongly agree that they’re motivated to do outstanding work when a manager provides daily vs. annual feedback.
Unlike the backward-looking annual review, regular check-ins give managers the opportunity to offer feedback while it’s still fresh, while giving employees the opportunity to get their questions answered faster. And according to our latest Hiring Challenges Survey, more than half of employers (54%) are shifting towards informal performance check-ins.
On any given day, employees and managers should be able to:
- Give recognition: Share positive feedback with your coworkers to acknowledge a job well done.
- Seek feedback: Ask for input from others to gain insights into how you're doing.
- Provide feedback: Offer helpful suggestions on a team member's performance, or ask for feedback on your direct reports from their coworkers.
Sometimes feedback is required at the start of a project. Other times it makes more sense to check in halfway through, or recap after it’s completed.
With a user-friendly performance management app, you can send default questions from manager to employee, employee to manager, or employee to employee, to make real-time feedback a reality.
4. Real-time recognition
Employees shouldn’t have to wait for human resources to collect mountains of performance data to receive thanks for a job well done. Make them wait, and they might just head for the door.
According to data from Gallup, employees who don’t feel adequately recognized are twice as likely to say they'll quit in the next year.
Recognition is a low-cost, high-impact way to increase employee retention, while reaffirming your performance values to the rest of the team. But as with feedback, it has to be timely, specific, and relevant in order to be effective.
Here are a few key principles to deliver recognition employees will appreciate:
- Give public shoutouts to groups of employees or individual teams for outstanding performance and/or completion of a major goal or milestone.
- Send private recognition to employees who prefer low-key acknowledgements to public praise.
- Share recognition with the manager and employee when you want to make sure an employee’s contribution is seen and acknowledged by their supervisor.
To make it easy for managers to deliver fast feedback and recognition even while up against their own deadlines, look for performance management software that includes pre-built templates and comment generators they can quickly insert and customize.
With the right conversation starters at their fingertips, managers won’t have to face down the dreaded blank page syndrome every time they want to share praise or feedback.
5. Built-in engagement functions
It’s no secret employers are facing an historic engagement crisis. But according to research from Gallup, feedback is the light at the end of the tunnel: a whopping 80% of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged.
Today a growing number of companies are moving away from the punitive performance reviews of the past, to a process focused on coaching, development, and even job redesign. And they’re seeing increased resilience and profitability as a result.
But feedback can backfire if it isn’t carefully delivered. To ensure feedback is perceived as helpful and productive, make sure managers are prepared to:
- Describe the employee’s behavior
- Avoid labeling or judging the behavior
- Share the impact of the behavior
- Give concrete recommendations on how to improve
- Stay factual, rather than focusing on emotions
Feedback requests to team members should be light and easy to complete, preferably with recommended questions to help employees get started.
A great rule of thumb is to use a set of 3-5 specific questions to bring about actionable insights. Here are some sample questions to get you started:
- What’s one thing I can do to help improve the performance of the team?
- What’s the one thing preventing the team from operating at peak
- performance?
- How do you think X issue went? Could we have resolved it better?
To make sure your employee feedback system is moving the needle on employee engagement, take time to decide how you’ll define the success of your program.
For example, you could choose to measure the number of users giving and receiving feedback to get a feel for employee adoption, or look at the total percentage of users that provide feedback when requested.
Make your performance feedback count
Whether you’re designing your employee feedback system to help increase employee retention, ramp up engagement, or do all of the above, breaking it out of the confines of the annual performance review and bringing into the day-to-day reality of your business is key.
And the right feedback platforms can help make it easy. Breezy Perform helps managers gather feedback faster, give kudos where kudos are due, and deliver constructive criticism without the ick, so that you and your entire team can stay focused on what matters.
Get your free trial of Breezy Perform to learn more.
