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How to Shift an Approach and Attitude Toward Employee Review – Manager’s Guide

Giving and receiving employee performance evaluations is a standard business practice. But both managers and employees dread that time of the year when their performance will be evaluated.

Why do employees have a negative attitude towards performance evaluation? And why do so many managers fail to provide meaningful and effective feedback?

The answer is simple. Many business leaders will apply a traditional approach to employee review, hosting performance appraisal meetings once a year or every six months, failing to showcase specific improvements, or being vague about how their employees perform.

When employee feedback is this scarce, employees can get nervous and scared about it, not knowing what to expect from managers’ feedback or how it may affect their position in a company.

Finally, employees may usually get only negative feedback where managers are focusing on the job aspects they need to improve, undermining their positive results. 

This vague, unfair, and scarce feedback may quickly drive your employees to disengagement, lack of motivation, and even burnout. All this can result in employees quitting and leaving you to tackle the unwanted costs of hiring new team members and redistributing their workload.

If you want to avoid this worst-case scenario, especially now that a severe economic crisis is looming, try to embrace the data-driven approach to delivering feedback and abandon ineffective practices.

The good news is that advanced AI solutions for employee tracking can offer you detailed information about the way your employees spend their time at work. You can use these reports to create real-time, specific, objective performance evaluations, emphasizing employees’ achievements and identifying issues that need to be addressed.

Here you’ll find some tips on how to deliver effective feedback and turn it from an unpleasant experience to a motivating and engaging one for both you and your employees.

Incorporate Frequent Feedback into Your Company Culture

If you want to avoid making your employees stressed and frustrated about the annual feedback that can’t paint an accurate picture of their performance, try to make delivering feedback a continuous practice.

You should use every opportunity to recognize outstanding achievements and contributions in different job aspects. You can host informative one-on-one weekly, after meetings, or presentations to give short feedback.

In this way, your employees will always know in which segments they excel and what improvements they need to make to fulfill their potential.

By making performance evaluations a regular practice, you will show a positive side of feedback that your employees may have not seen before. They can take these reports to celebrate their achievements and work on their weaknesses to further enhance their productivity.

Focus on Positives Rather than Negatives

Gallup finds that employees who use their strengths daily are six times more likely to be engaged in their work than those who don’t. So when offering feedback, make sure that it’s focused on the positive sides of employees’ performance. 

Employee monitoring software can be of great help when identifying apps or tools that your employees use efficiently, or the tasks and projects where they excel.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should ignore specific performance issues. Constructive feedback can be equally effective as the positive one if it’s accompanied by effective solutions your employees can use to tackle these issues and improve their performance. 

For example, if your employees get reckless and miss important steps when completing specific tasks, your feedback shouldn’t be “Stop being reckless.” 

Because this won’t solve the problem.

Instead try saying something like: “When you are focused and collected, you tend to outperform others in completing specific tasks.” Then offer some advice on how to stay focused on the steps they need to take to finish their tasks successfully. 

When employees are aware of their strong sides, they are more likely to use them efficiently to enhance their productivity, feeling more confident and motivated to do their job.

Offer Specific Performance Evaluations

The time of vague and generic feedback is long gone. Employees nowadays demand to have regular detailed feedback to know what works and what doesn’t.

By telling them exactly how they contributed to completing a significant task, you’ll show them that their work is appreciated. 

Instead of a: “Good job in the meeting,”  you can say “ Your detailed report helped everyone navigate through the meeting easily.

Recognitions like this can do wonders for employee satisfaction and retention rates alike.

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