 Giving good, useful feedback to employees is not easy. If you don't give feedback or you give bland, useless feedback, then your employees won't improve what they're doing quickly, or at all, and you will personally be a lot worse off. The team and business will also suffer lower performance. Giving feedback to employees is often emotionally charged for both parties, yet no one likes being criticised or told their work is not up to standard. On the other side, managers worry about the social and professional fallout from being critical. Sugarcoating feedback, being overly diplomatic, or watering down the message when giving negative feedback is commonplace for these reasons. I take you through a four-step framework for giving useful feedback to employees, feedback that is specific, constructive and useful, that helps drive actions and improvements without offending the other person. The four steps are showing on screen. After talking through this four-step framework for giving useful feedback to employees, I'll take you through five ways to deliver feedback so the other person is much more likely to accept the feedback and use it. These steps are showing on screen. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25-year management career in corporates and household names through to SMEs. feedback increases confidence, self-awareness, performance and the desire to learn. All really good traits to encourage in your team. If you're new to this channel, enhance.training shares business and people management expertise to help you improve your performance and that of your team and business. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. I'm going to take you through the framework I use for giving feedback. Try to include all four points within your feedback. The order of each point builds on the last. Include each of the points rather than worrying about the order of the points. When giving useful feedback to employees, the first step is to describe exactly what's happened. Your feedback needs to be specific to be useful. If it is general, how is the other person going to know what they need to do more of or to change? When you give feedback, leave the other person in no doubt about exactly what they have done. An example, don't say, I think you've done a really good job. Well done. Say instead, I really liked how you really dug into the detail of our five main customers. You waited through the information that most others would have been intimidated by. It was great that you spoke to all the account managers first, which gave you good insight into what types of insights they needed. You then categorized the data accordingly and then pulled out some incredibly useful insights, which led to winning over £100,000 in business. I'm really impressed and the account managers are even more impressed. Well done. Make sure you take the time to describe exactly what was done well and not done well. This applies to positive and negative feedback. When giving useful feedback to employees, the second part to include is to go through the impact of what has happened. Explaining what the impact of the actions or the lack of actions provides the context of the feedback and why you feel it is important to give the feedback. This is doubly important when you are giving negative feedback. Be specific in terms of the cost or benefit to the business if that is what is appropriate. You know, in terms of time saved or spent or profits and cash gained or lost, increased complexity, etc. When giving behavioral feedback, talk about the impact on feelings, on morale, the impact on the strength or the positivity of the relationships, etc. An alternative approach to telling them of the impact as you or others see it is to ask them to tell you what they think the impact is. Using this approach will help them take in more and remember more. Make sure the person receiving the feedback understands the impact of the actions or lack of actions. When giving useful feedback to employees, the third step is to explain why the action was good or bad. Explaining the why is critical to help the other person learn and convincing them to change what they are doing if the actions were bad. If they don't understand why their actions are causing problems, it is much harder for the person to motivate themselves to change and to understand how they need to change. The why provides valuable context. If their actions are good, then explaining why their actions were good certainly cements the request for them to do more of these actions. When giving useful feedback to employees, the fourth step is to talk through how to improve in the future. Talking about how to improve in the future is the most valuable part of the feedback. I always prefer to ask the other person to tell me what they would do differently next time round before I offer any suggestions. Asking rather than telling also forces them to become more self-aware, which is another very good skill to develop. Asking rather than telling nearly always brings new ideas to the discussion, but more importantly the ideas are theirs. They are much more likely to implement their ideas compared to your ideas. The purpose of giving feedback is asking for change or if the actions are good to do more of them. You want to get improvement in performance. If your team member has several options and how to implement those options are mapped out, you are much more likely to get the performance improvement you are seeking. Go through this improvement step regardless of whether the feedback is positive or negative. Make the time to map out the how to improve part of the feedback. So we've gone through a framework to structure the feedback you give to make it specific and useful to the individual. I am now going to go through five factors that make a massive difference to how much of the feedback the recipient takes in and even more importantly how much they put into action. Firstly, when giving useful feedback to employees provide feedback consistently designed to help the individual. With that individual and with the wider team consistently providing feedback with the primary purpose of helping them improve will help you build a reputation as a supportive manager with a keen interest in developing your team. This in turn will give you if firstly team members who will actually listen to you and take action. Secondly, a lot more goodwill and the ability to ask for favours. Thirdly, more leeway to make mistakes without negative consequences. And fourth, an attractive team for others to join. Develop this always educating mindset and put in the time to think how best to improve team members. Your team members will pay you back many times over. I absolutely promise. Secondly, when giving useful feedback to team members provide feedback in a timely fashion. The value of feedback reduces with time. When you think about it, people forget what happened or their recollection changes over time. Secondly, they lose opportunities to actually take positive action from the feedback. And thirdly, they're certainly not as grateful to get the feedback a long time after the event. As a manager is absolutely in your interest to give feedback quickly. I do suggest you give yourself some time to reflect and to construct your feedback before giving it. If you're personally annoyed or angry let yourself cool down before speaking to the other person. Use your judgement in terms of how quickly to give feedback. As a rule of thumb, most feedback should be given within a day or two of the event driving it. Thirdly, when giving useful feedback to team members be honest in your feedback. Being honest is about telling it how it is. It's about not shying away from the difficult messages because of personal discomfort. It is about not diluting the message. Being honest is about making your feedback as useful and reflective of reality as possible. This gives the other person the best picture of what happened the impact and what they can do to change and or improve. With all that being said you still do need to be as diplomatic as possible in the words you choose, the tone of your voice and your body language without diluting the message. You do need to be considerate of their feelings to be empathetic and considerate. And if you don't they simply won't listen to you and use to take in what you're saying. Fourth, when giving useful feedback to employees be specific in your feedback. As mentioned already, make your feedback specific. This makes it so much more useful and actionable. Being specific does take a bit more effort, thought and possibly even some research yet you do get so much more back from the other person by being specific. It is hard to create positive actions for others with general feedback. There is a limited opportunity to learn and improve with general feedback and taking action is a lot harder. With specific feedback you're almost providing a roadmap of the action you want them to take. Then it comes down to the other person choosing to take action. So be specific with your feedback. Fifth, when giving useful feedback to team members focus on the actions not the person. Focusing on the actions or lack of actions creates much less emotionally charged feedback. If the feedback is negative then you're criticising their actions rather than them as a person. This is easy to listen to and accept and therefore has a better chance of being acted on. Don't make statements about the person such as you failed to deliver or you did not do a good job. Feedback on actions would sound much more like when you're analysing this customer you didn't categorise the data clearly enough which led to two key insights being missed. Spotting these insights would have changed the recommendations made. Keep the feedback focused as much as possible on the actions or lack of actions. This helps the other person understand and take in the feedback. So there you have a four step framework for constructing useful and specific feedback and five actions that will help you deliver that feedback so the other person is a lot more likely to take action to improve or do more of the good actions. Individuals and teams improving their performance helps everyone, the individual, the team, the business and more importantly you as their manager. The four step feedback framework is first you describe exactly what happened secondly go through the impact of what happened thirdly explain why the action was good or bad and fourth talk through how to improve in the future. And the five feedback delivery actions are firstly make sure the feedback is designed to help the individual and aid their learning consistently secondly make sure it's timely give the feedback soon after the event issue or achievement third make sure it's honest tell it how it is don't beat around the bush or sugar coated etc fourth be specific make the feedback as detailed as possible with examples and facts and fifth focus it on the actions taken or not taken rather than opinions about the person. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon.