Reinventing Performance Management Through Employee Feedback

According to Armstrong, ‘Performance Management is a process which contributes to the effective management of individuals and teams in order to achieve high levels of organization performance’ . The performance management is varying from one organization to another as the employees need to understand its goal, mission, and aim to succeed either by motivating them, acquiring essential experiences or skills, resources and supports from the employer or supervisor. This eventually helps to retain, observe, and enhance employee performing in the organization and even outside the work. It also improves in employee advancement at the same time as progressing their individual and career growth for their profession goals.

Whereas, in traditional way, Performance Management is only the continuous contribution to the organization as it only focused on company’s goals and aim where it affected to the employees and even employers cannot pinpoint their lack of work. Their performance is hardly done due to low motivation, annually reviewing their implementation, very less feedback and not scope for development growth and their career. Thus, this assessment will be focused on the importance of providing Feedback to the employees as in with different types of Feedback that helps to grow their skills and experiences in their personal and professional lives.

Introduction

Feedback is one of the effective ways to deliver the employees performance by optimistic outcomes and to develop their work continuously or their skills as it helps to review everything where the participation and involvement are drawn into. Eventually the employees discover their work through quicker, safer, or sooner that makes them happy and encouragement to do in more efficient approach. The new way of performance management is initiated as it gives feedback, communication, and coaching to the employees so that they can know what they are performing, what will be their outcomes, different skills that will be used in various fields. The healthy workplace, motivational people, positive people ensure that all are performing meaningful task and can have their exact feedback too.

Hence, people are changing according to the continuous feedback in order to perform effectively and efficiently in any tasks by delivering meaningful advice through straightforward, precise, strengths oriented and actions. This allows people to associate what the organizations require and motivates them to work in team. As the company gives the feedback to the employees, it ultimately trains them to grow on their skills, experiences, interaction with the senior or employers, getting mentor when needed, chances to improve in decision making or problem-solving skills. These all-abilities support to become better employees and give best shot in the task.

The different companies are expected to give either individual or group feedback to their employees as well because group feedback gives certain goals to work that increases their results, team’s confidence, and pride. According to the article of HBR, it showed that the continuous feedback helps to set up specific goals in terms of receiving some sort of weekly bonuses to employees as they presented good works. It also explained as how the employee’s performance assessed, evaluating process and their results. Again, in the same year, Deloitte represented as about 62% of employees are getting individual feedback from the enhanced HR software method.

Types of Feedback

Informal Feedback

It is one of the traditional ways to give feedback to the employees due to the ongoing, real time advice on their performance or one on one. This plays the essential part in employees’ performance as they get to learn and obtain the training and development feedback when they move in their career. Moreover, it is recognized as ‘impromptu’ feedback since it happens continuously and does not need any plan to give as it occurs any time or any place. In context of informal feedback, it is key aspect in people’s confidence due to the immediate admiration, trust, communication, and acknowledgment given by the managers when they do something good for the companies, thus it impacts on their lives too. According to Scott Whiteford, Director of Leadership Development and Analytics at Talent Plus, he stated as, ‘By waiting until an annual or biannual meeting to discuss the event, the leader and employee have missed the opportunity to dissect and build on what happened’.

Formal Feedback

It is also known as ‘constructive’ feedback because it only focuses on evidence-centered comments like work performance credentials, project evaluations, colleague surveys, HR reports and yearly reviews. Normally, it includes of managers and leadership of the company to make ensure that all the people are enhancing their skills, performance or their errors which helps to boost their personal and career development in persons. This feedback facilitates the employee self-esteem and reduces confusion as they do not have to wait for their reviews instantly and even get the positivity influence through their behaviour and from their friends when they need help. Though, this feedback also consists of four different types like:

Positive Feedback

This is way of communication method to recognize individuals’ powers, accomplishments, and appraisal which implemented from previous acts and should be in frequent acts to improve so that they can feel determined and inspired to work further and to overcome with any obstacles in future. It is one of the easiest ways to provide positive feedback than a negative due to the way the employees work in terms of honest resource of information, but it should be acceptable with negative as not to keep the employees in wrong concepts. As this feedback is helping to do better in the work, emphasizing their employees in good lifestyles and establishing a culture of gratitude in response of 65% to the employees in their work performance. Also, from the survey of Gallup which was done on productive businesses (retail stores or big industrial resources) had about 12.5% in terms of delivering constructive outcomes for those company who had received positive feedbacks from the managers or supervisors than those who did not have.

Negative Feedback

It is necessary to give negative feedback to the employees so that they know what they are working in the assessment and help them to change it when situation demands. Negative feedback can be seen in different ways as how the employee’s response it, but if these feedbacks are giving through constructive way, the employees respond on positive way as in they get chances to show the employers what they can do and be more motivated to work. In this case, these employees see as ‘glass half full’ because of the opportunities to improve their performance and beat the obstacles in respected period. In other hand, this same feedback can demoralise them, make them depressed, anxiety and reduced their performance in negative traits which can lead it into angered thus can make wrong impression to seniors.

Overall, this feedback gives roughly 83% of employees into more productive and appreciation in the workplace in spite of receiving their negative or positive feedback to achieve company’s goal and targets by the study of analysis from Officevibe globally. This negative feedback motivates to work well, creates huge prospects to improve in right direction, helps to prevent the same mistake again and discovers new approaches to take. Therefore, people want to have negative feedback more than positive one to grow their own skills rather than only having positive responses every time.

Negative Feedforward

It is kind of giving curative explanations to the employees about their future performance so that they will not recurrence the same thing again. It gives hope to change the future by positive thinking and changing the ideas for the betterment of work. Workers can rise their opportunities by making right decision and concentrates on the result not on drawbacks.

Positive Feedforward

The another set of positive feedback that has reassuring explanations to the employees about their future performance so they can improve in future efficiently. This can be view as ‘feedforward coaching’ to develop their skills, future growth and elevate understanding however it is not on yearly basis due to the advancement of the employees in casual way which can be occurred if it is needed. In this context, the people can have so many advantages due to the reinforcement of learning various lessons and improvise them so that they can take responsibilities about the companies and their goals. This helps to create innovative ideas and principle in the workers capacity not only in shared models of the company. This feedback is helpful to create or change the behaviours of people in workplace through their performance and improvement which will bring benefits for themselves and their companies with regard to their motivation in work with self-confidence.

360 Degree Feedback

This feedback is collecting all kinds of feedback form the managers, associates, direct reports supervisors and self-evaluation in relation of the employee performance. It is used to promote individual’s self-recognition from any sort of partiality in the company among the feedback pursuer and feedback givers. According to the research of around 500 companies globally, it showed that about 90% are using this 360 Degree Feedback in order to evaluate the work of their employees and for enhancing their career goals and their development in business. Also, from the Director of GoodHire, she declared that ‘We use it for managers to have insight and visibility into how team members are working collaboratively together – if they see certain areas that need improvement across the team, they can refine in on those areas moving forward’ . Thus, it obviously shows that the managers be more dedicated on their people if they lack any skills so they can give them chances to improve those areas.

The people who are motivated from the feedback gives productive outcomes either its inspirational or just negative, but it helps them to know their inner potential to work harder and achieve targets in particular time as well as makes it more prominent in terms of their strengths and weakness in different areas to build via performance appraisal. In the other hand, the openness culture in the company is generating more outcomes as they voice out their opinions in front of their teams or managers so they will get to know what they are doing and what will be the best for the company when sharing various ideas to work on. Lastly, skill gaps are one of the necessary tools in terms of development and individual growth where it creates employees to be self-awareness and to support individual growth for future ambitions too.

Challenges Faced When Providing Feedback to Employees

The performance feedback is crucial to provide to the people as it gives ambiguities, nervousness, depression and conflicts between the employees and employers. The positive or negative feedback is depending upon the people performance as how they are performing in a week or a month, however, this approach carries out the outcomes of the people on the performance improvement. Here are some of the criticisms of providing feedback to the employees are:

• The people faced challenges in feedback through lack of communication because it influences their low activity in the task and creates low trust issues that affects the company’s growth where they do not feel connect to share their thoughts to the employers. Thus, it is needed to be concerned about giving them constructive feedback from time to time so the employers need to focus why there is communication gap between each other and need to know their weakness so that they can help them to overcome by creating different activities in the workplace.
•  As from the study in 2015, it showed around 32% of people are involved in their work but 50.8% are not which clearly determines that they are not fully motivated or inspired to work. Also, 17.2% were disconnected as they were not too committed to their work. Hence, the company should give them opportunities to share their thoughts in front of all, give them training in those areas where they have weakness, and give them chances to grow their capabilities by signing them in tasks. These will give them aspiration to work well and be more appreciated in the company where the feedback plays vital role in their lives.
• Nevertheless, the negative feedback gives the people low engagement as they loathe negative comments while some of them feel negative feedback gives them chances to improve their work. So, the negative comments can change the people behaviour into sour that results to decreases their performance and lack of commitment to the company.

Conclusion

Therefore, the employers should provide meaningful feedback to the employees to know their strengths and weakness which eventually helps them to enhance their personal, professional careers, skills, and abilities to work in any company. The constructive feedback either positive or negative feedbacks gives hope to the employees to improve their weakness and motivated to move on even if there are obstacles in the workplace. Constructive feedback improves to discover about ourselves in performances and the actions that involves others which expands in self-awareness and builds personal growth.