What do you take into account to make the feedback you give to employees (including the positive ones) work?

How often have you heard from job applicants that the opportunity to develop is what motivates them most and that this is what they expect from their future employer? Why, then, do so many employees not change their behaviour under the influence of feedback, when it is also beneficial for the employer that employees want to learn throughout their employment with the company and become better and better? The secret is openness to feedback.

How to recognise an employee who is open to feedback and how to shape this trait, I will try to hint at next.

Active and passive feedback collection

Team members differ in how they receive, process and use feedback to change behaviour. Learning about these differences can significantly contribute to increasing employee motivation to change desired behaviours and competencies.

The first difference concerns how employees gather information. A team can consist of both active feedback seekers and passive observers of the environment. The active ones directly ask their boss and colleagues for feedback on their performance, possible ways forward, what and how they can do better or differently. They carefully review the results of employee appraisals, follow performance tables, etc. Passive employees, on the other hand, monitor the environment and search for information indicative of how others evaluate their work. For a complete picture of themselves, employees collect feedback in the two ways described above. However, the differences lie in the intensity of the first and second type of behaviour.

Visible as if at a fork

The active style of seeking feedback is riskier than the passive style, as it involves exposing oneself to judgement and the employee is, as it were, ‘at the fork’, which can make things uncomfortable. The benefit is that the information gathered is non-accidental and the employee learns the specifics more quickly. The Nais study in collaboration with PBS found that employees prefer to give feedback collectively, on the basis of several tasks, rather than immediately after a task is completed. In some organisational cultures, asking for feedback can be interpreted as a sign of weakness, uncertainty, the need to confirm a chosen course of action. This is not conducive to being proactive and open to feedback. Perhaps employees feel that constant feedback would interfere with both their work and the manager’s work. According to in-depth interviews with managers**, employees just starting out in their career have no problem with actively seeking feedback.

“The 20- to 30-year-olds just keep demanding feedback and keep following you around like that: Did you like it? And how did it work out? And what did you think?” And you have to give them that feedback. Say, “That was great, that was cool, I liked that. They expect evaluation all the time.

Talk to my hand

Feedback on an employee’s core competencies, can cause strong emotional arousal that is unpleasant e.g. anxiety that something is wrong with the employee. Even operational feedback, concerning the performance of day-to-day duties, can be a threat to self-esteem, causing dissonance, especially if the evaluation is very different from what we knew about ourselves until now. People who are open to feedback like to receive it, they can handle their emotions well without the need to use tactics that lower emotional arousal, such as: complimenting the person giving feedback or discrediting, rationalising or justifying it. So, if you are observing one of these behaviours in your employee, it could mean that they are finding it difficult to accept feedback and are trying to cope with it in this way.

Why does anyone need it?

An employee is less likely to act on feedback if they find it unhelpful. Useful information is information that, in the view of the recipient, makes a significant contribution to success at work, to improving performance and the way he or she works, and supports the employee’s goals (individual and team).

In the cited PBS and Nais study, negative feedback was less often considered useful than positive feedback and less often an indicator of how employees are perceived by their boss, colleagues and customers. On the other hand, employees were more likely to feel obliged to comply with negative than with positive feedback, regardless of its source.

Taking responsibility for change

Managers have their ways of getting an employee to act in a certain way, but without the employee feeling a sense of responsibility for putting the feedback into practice, this is a difficult task. An employee is open to feedback if he or she recognises that it is up to him or her to ensure that the new action follows the recommendations, rather than, for example, a manager. He acts until he has applied the most important tips and suggestions for improvement.

Seeing yourself in someone else’s eyes

Every employee is part of a social network, but to varying degrees they are sensitive to what others think and say about them. For those with a high social awareness, feedback is a valuable indication of how others perceive them, and through what the boss or colleagues say, they become more aware of the impression they make and can manage it. They are more open to feedback and more ready to change their behaviour under the influence of others. People with low social self-awareness are more focused on their opinion and feelings, what others say is not a strong argument to change behaviour.

Can I do it?

In order to change behaviour, it is also necessary for the employee to strongly believe that he or she has the competence to do so, that he or she can handle the feedback, can apply it. And this is not just about the employee’s general belief in his or her own self-efficacy, which indicates that he or she is generally able to overcome difficulties of various kinds, but also about that concerning a specific situation or task. Contrary to what one might think, a sense of efficacy is not only about corrective feedback, it is also about positive feedback. If, for example, a highly valued employee is told “keep it up”, “I like the pace of your work”, but the employee is exhausted, the application of positive feedback, may be beyond their strength.

How to increase openness to feedback?

Giving feedback is a more complex process than you might think. Employees – the recipients of feedback – are actively involved, so there are many potential factors that complicate the matter. What conditions should be created in the organisation to increase the openness of employees to feedback? Here are some suggestions:

• building an organisational culture in which employees and managers frequently receive and give feedback, including informally,
• creating a working environment in which actively seeking feedback and acting on it is seen as an indicator of effectiveness,
• periodic training in giving qualitative and useful feedback to managers and employees,
• clear communication of objectives and standards,
• involving employees in the development of clear and multidimensional performance indicators,
• showing tolerance for mistakes, treating failures as part of the change process,
• discussing feedback with the employee, engaging in dialogue, helping to interpret it,
• showing that improvements in performance under the influence of feedback are recognised and rewarded,
• giving employees the freedom to decide how they will use feedback – activating self-monitoring processes.