The Importance of Feedback- both good and bad!

Feedback can create collaboration, a culture of connection and sustainable change.

Providing feedback is an essential element to progress and improvement for your business. It is important that your employees are aware of what they did well and what they can improve on if you want to produce work that is more refined, efficient and cost effective.

Did you know that a third of managers admitted to being uncomfortable about giving direct feedback to an employee if they believed the person would respond in a negative way? The same survey also identified one in five managers reporting that they had difficulty giving praise for a job well done and another 16% were likely to credit themselves, rather than others, for innovative ideas that came to fruition in the workplace.

Instead of relaying feedback via email or avoiding discussions regarding past and future work performance aim to communicate feedback to your employees because most people will value constructive criticism- even if it stings a little at the time!! A great example demonstrating the benefit of providing feedback is from a recent survey which found that of more than 1000 full time employees surveyed, 81% would rather join a company that values ‘open communication’ than one that offers free perks such as gym memberships, free food or  top health plans.

To be more effective at communicating the tough stuff or showing some appreciation, the following tips may be helpful!

1. CHOOSE YOUR WORDS WISELY

There is always a nicer way of framing something negative. Instead of focusing the whole discussion on the consequences of an employee’s mistakes, try to include specific examples of desired behaviour to illustrate the issues.

2. LISTEN

You may learn something! Or gain a different perspective of an issue from the employee. Listening conveys respect and gives space for managers and employees to understand the situation together.

3. DON’T MAKE IT PERSONAL

It is easy to take things personally in a direct feedback conversation so make feedback sessions with employees as constructive as possible. Try to focus on how behaviour or decisions made by the employee involved affected the business, rather than you personally. 

4. fOLLOW UP

Follow up on the employee after a feedback conversation to ensure they feel motivated to take on any suggestions and to ensure that any feelings of hurt or resentment are addressed in a timely manner. 

5. INSPIRE GREATNESS

Make sure employees understand that you have aspirations for who they can become and that you believe they are capable of accepting feedback and bettering themselves in the process.

SURVIVOR: The Game of One Foot in Front of the Other During December

During Christmas, it is not uncommon to experience financial pressures from debts, gifts and celebrations; family pressures due to hosting or attending gatherings (or a lack thereof). To add to the mounting social pressures, work pressures accumulate as New Year deadlines approach.

Protecting your mental health (and general wellbeing) is vital to your employer to ensure you are able to contribute creatively and productively; and, to ensure that you have the resources to get through the difficult times where your efforts and output (and let’s not forget satisfaction) may suffer.

Here are 3 tips to motivate you and safeguard your general mental health at this time of year:

1. Keep an eye out for red flags

While it is normal to experience a degree of pressure and frustration at this time of year, it’s important to note when this may become a larger problem. If you or a colleague feels sleep deprived, easily angered, anti-social, or generally and uncharacteristically negative, this may be a sign that the stress is becoming overwhelming. If people are reacting to you as if you are acting out of character, seek support and look for resources around you that you can use to your advantage. It’s normal to feel the need to seek support at these times so don’t hesitate in speaking up and finding help where you can if you feel overwhelmed.

2. Review workloads

Stress occurs when our demands exceed our resources. Quite simply, you may not have enough time or the resources to get the job done. Pay close attention to whether your efforts are sloppy or are being completed late, as this may occur due to under-staffing and over-loading rather than a lack of enthusiasm or your competence levels. Communicate these concerns with the team and where necessary, give clients advance notice that deadlines may alter during a resource-restricted period.

3. Seek feedback 

Seeking feedback is a great way to establish how you are performing. Even if you are sure that things are going well, it never hurts to ask and hear it from your managers. A simple word of appreciation can motivate and encourage anyone and, even constructive feedback can be positive for clarifying your role and tasks that are important. You don’t need to organise a long, formal feedback session, even just asking how you went on a project or task that you have just completed is enough. Feel free to talk with your employer about your concerns and inform then that their candid feedback and support could really help.

While Christmas is a stressful time of year for many, effective management through communicating with and supporting those around you can have a snowball effective to put the peace, love and joy (and put your productivity and satisfaction) back into the festive season!

Six Management Practices That Can Boost Employee Productivity

Close your eyes and imagine a world where all your employees could work at their full performance capacity, for every minute of every day. A world where your staff don’t steal glances at the clock every minute, and where they aren't taking their 10th coffee break within the hour.

Here are six tips to help boost employee productivity:

Understand your employee

Why is it they come to work? How should you communicate with them? Do they like to receive praise publicly or privately? How do they like to be rewarded, and how do they respond best to feedback? Understanding your employees on a more personal level means that you can cater tasks, feedback and incentives to boost their morale and improve their productivity

Carefully structured incentives 

As a general rule of thumb, a manager or director of a company shouldn’t expect an employee to work for the sole success of the enterprise. Employees may come for social gratification, financial stability, and a whole host of other reasons. When a task is seen to solely benefit senior levels, it will see junior level staff becoming unmotivated to reach the same goals to the best of their abilities. Employees must see worthy and valuable benefits and rewards of completing goals. This means that management should conduct motivation tests to understand the drive behind why employees come to work every day, and reward the team equal to their contribution and according to their desires.

Constantly providing meaningful and constructive feedback

Feedback systems should be implemented, and performance evaluation tests should be regularly conducted to identify talent gaps or to identify where employees excel.

Adequate training

From conducting feedback tests, management should employ talent management tools to improve staff in required areas. Employees who receive complimentary courses or trainings will feel that management is invested in their success and talent – whilst management benefits through their improved skill set and morale.

Personalising the job

Employees all work in different ways – and giving individuals the wrong tools can often cause them to work slowly and more unproductively. Allowing employees’ flexibility in how and when they work – providing that they have a good record of meeting deadlines – can allow them to work at a pace and in a way that is beneficial to both them and the company.

Give credit where it is due

Recognition reinforces good behavior, and allows the employee to realize that their good work has not gone unnoticed. Managers should assume that employees do not realise that they’re doing a good job, and give recognition to show their appreciation for the workers’ efforts.

Performance capacity is largely dictated by management practices, and a manager’s ability to maintain a constant level of motivation through the implementation of performance management activities. So what can you do to boost your employees’ performance?

Boosting employee productivity is not as simple as throwing around some cash. It grows from monitoring and improving your workplace through to understanding the employees, and allowing them to feel the benefits of their hard work. The employees should feel as if they are a valued member of the team.

Tools such as job satisfaction surveys can help you understand your employees, as well as identify what may need changing in your workplace. For more information on job satisfaction surveys, please visit the Psych Press webpage: http://psychpress.com.au/psychometric/talent-retain.asp?job-satisfaction-survey

Giving Employees Feedback – how to tackle it the right way

You don't have to be a business owner or manager to find yourself in situations where giving well structured feedback can be the difference between positive work results, or work that leaves much to the imagination where nothing is learnt. While not rocket science, there are certainly ways of giving feedback that are more effective than others, and to make sure you're helping yourself by helping your colleagues it's important to work on your feedback skills!

Here are our top four tips for giving feedback the right way:

1. Give feedback in person

Giving feedback face-to-face, as opposed to via email or phone, can make things much more personable. It also allows both parties to clarify any misunderstandings if necessary. Imagine an employee is feeling particularly swamped for time and pressure one day, then checks his or her email to discover some feedback but, worst, it’s all negative! Understandably, many people could see this approach as a personal attack, and could end up feeling overwhelmed.. Moreover, it’s much easier to make sure you convey the appropriate tone or specific examples, when you do so in person.

 2. Emotional Intelligence is crucial

When providing constructive feedback, pay particular attention to your colleague's  body language. Actively listen and be happy to hear them voice their opinion. Be willing to adapt your language or tone accordingly. If you’re giving feedback on behalf of someone else (e.g. another manager), be very careful with your choice of wording – make sure it’s delivered in a meaningful and accurate way. When discussing a mistake or a problem, be sure to first identify the issue and then ask "what do you think could have changed to gain a more desired result?" rather than jump to "what did you do wrong?" Creating any feelings of shame or blame are barriers to constructive and open feedback, and may come back to annoy you later.

 3. Choose the right time and place

This is absolutely crucial. Generally, giving feedback as soon as you can (e.g. soon after an incident occurred) is the best time to do so. There is, however, one main exception. If emotions are running high, it might be better to wait until yourself, or your recipient, has calmed down first, to ensure you remain level-headed. Otherwise, rushing to give feedback can be more detrimental than beneficial – which is far from ideal! Decide whether feedback is best given in a private or public place. Sometimes it is nice to be publicly recognized for doing something well (positive feedback). However, everyone is different so be sure to cater to individual preferences. If a particular employee doesn’t like to be drawn out in a crowd, take note. You can guarantee that if giving constructive criticism, in stark contrast, it will be much better received by an employee if you do so in a private atmosphere in order to minimize potential embarrassment for them. 

 4. Be specific, provide examples and be future-oriented

Have you ever tried to give someone feedback, be it a friend, colleague, or family member, only to get the classic response: “Give me one example of when I did that!”. If this sounds all too familiar, you won’t forget this last point. Make sure you keep your feedback specific, to avoid any confusion or uncertainty. Whether it’s good or bad news, using the STAR method is a very effective approach. That is – Situation, Task, Action, Result. For example, if your employee has been successful in a task let your employee know how their actions gained an effective result. If giving negative feedback, allow your employee to gain awareness of how to improve their actions in the future when faced with a similar situation, give them a chance to make suggestions for their own improvement. This makes your feedback more constructive than negative, and can help increase productivity, consistency, and efficiency for future projects.

Finally, don’t dwell on the past! Allow feedback to be seen as a useful strategy to improve employee performance. If you do this effectively, you will add value to your company.

7 Ways To Understand Your Online Audience

Customer Needs and Behaviour – ONLINE

Unless you are continually building knowledge about what satisfies your target market and what they are looking for, your message will attract a lot less interest. The wants of your target should be considered from need to search and then decision. If you can put the needs of your customers into a sentence from their perspective it will provide you with better accuracy in your message’s timeliness, method of delivery and most importantly, relevance.

There are several cost effective ways of getting to know ‘what they want’. Some of these are more subtle than others and require a great sense of listening so that you can get down to the core of what your target does and doesn’t want. These have been separated into channels below that should already be existing and require ongoing analysis. We then look at channels that can be implemented at later times and are not strictly ongoing.

Existing Channels that read Customer Behaviour

Social Media – When patterns emerge from complaints or compliments, it’s a great idea to save this data in a spreadsheet and share interesting or unique updates in reports. Facebook insights are useful but can’t categorise types of posts for you, and there’s nothing more annoying than trying to scroll through hundreds of posts to find a specific opinion, so save the info!

Phone / Online Chat – This may require some training. Many opinions and hints tend to be passed around more on the phone than in other channels. If someone calls to make an appointment or ask a question they could slip a “I just had to call because I couldn’t find it on your site,” which is priceless information for your team. Be sure that whoever handles calls is able to take note of or share this information.

Emails – Similarly to the above channels, emails can give you a lot of opinions and needs which are simpler to record into monthly (or weekly) reports. Detailed complaints will generally come through here more often, which will give you an order of what needs to be changed sooner. This will also give you a feel for what people are looking for in a business such as yours, and what they already know.

Ask questions – If you have any conversation opportunities with customers who have used your site and services, don’t shy away from the opportunity to ask them about their satisfaction and how they found you. Obviously you don’t want to open a can of worms but if you’ve recently made changes, asking about them directly is one of the best ways to test success.

Additional Channels to look into

Usability tests – Usability tests allow you to gauge which methods are getting your customers from information search to your end goals better. Typically for the best results you will test ‘A’ against ‘B,’ where A represents a practice you already have in place and B represents a single change to A’s practice. When used on the same people within the same timeframe you can then more accurately compare which is more effective. Be sure to always hypothesise about what you’re trying to prove through the test and what the result will change.

                Good start: Five Second Test allows you to test and be tested with other webmaster site usability for new or upcoming pages, basic use is free! 

Survey / Questionnaire – People often discard survey requests, but this can be alleviated if you’re tying in a promotion (which we’ll cover later). There are sites available where you can make and implement customised surveys from measuring the success of changes or ‘taking a reading’ of how things are going. Make sure you have a goal for the value your survey will give you and make sure the questions can’t be misconstrued. 

                Good start: Survey Monkey is a friendly survey creator tool that allows you to ask just about anything and easily track user answers.

Site Feedback – Similar to asking questions directly, programs are already available that ask for ratings or   comments and can sit comfortably on your site. This makes it a lot easier to see what people think of you divided by demographics and can be either an ongoing practice or implemented to assist measuring a specific change or decision.

     Good start: If you’re serious about the right answers, Kampyle gives you an addition to your site that allows users to give their feedback directly.

Hit List

        I have looked over my current channels of receiving customer info and recorded data that has already come in

        I have involved other staff members in ongoing information collecting processes

        I have selected other possibilities to try out over a strategic timeframe

        I am taking notes of my most common type of customer, the need/s that lead them to finding my site and how they most commonly use it

For those in HR or Small Business

In general, the staff members who have the most contact with customers will be your frontlines for retrieving the most important and up to date information about your customers. If the person who answers the phone or greets customers notices a common complaint or question, get them to write it down and send it around. The more sharing going on, the wiser each decision maker will be.