Turnover rates for those who received feedback on their strengths were 14.9% lower than the employees who did not receive any feedback- Gallup
Does the thought of giving feedback to your coworker make you feel overwhelmed? Fret not, the good news is, there are some easy ways to provide feedback to the coworkers. Giving constructive feedback to your coworkers can help to identify the weakness and improve their performance. Read on this article to know more about it:
What is Constructive Feedback?
Constructive feedback refers to the feedback that is given to support individuals by identifying the weakness of the team members and developing a plan to help them overcome those weaknesses. As the aim of constructive feedback is the personal and professional development of an individual, it turns out to be positive in nature. Let’s take a look at the results of constructive feedback:
- It helps in improving the morale of the team members
- It helps in setting clear goals, and expectations for employees
- Constructive feedback helps in ensuring psychological safety, which is a crucial element for a high-performing team
- It helps in developing trust, accountability, and a sense of ownership in the team
How to write Constructive Feedback?
If you want to provide constructive feedback to your coworkers without breaking the harmony of the office environment, you can follow a technique known as the BIO method:
- Behaviour
- Impact
- Option
With this method, you can perform the following tasks:
- Firstly, you need to observe a specific behaviour and then provide details of what you observed
- Then you need to inform your colleagues what kind of impact that behaviour had on you, the team, or the organization
- Once this is done, you need to give a suggestion or an expectation for future behaviour.
Behaviour
Talking about behaviour without being subjective is not an easy task. You need to be very careful about the words you choose to describe the behaviour. Try to use an observing tone instead of a perceiving tone to provide feedback. For example, instead of saying ‘You looked quite confident while giving the presentation. That made me enjoy your presentation more, so keep it up.’, you could say ‘You stood up straight and looked around the audience. Due to this, I felt more engaged and thought you looked confident. Keep doing this!’. The latter looks more appropriate as it is describing the behaviour more appropriately than the former one. Your coworker would know what they actually did that caused the other person to feel a certain way.
Impact
When you explain the impact in ‘I’ language, then the impact is more. This means that you are explaining a certain behaviour that had an impact on you. For example, instead of saying, ‘you are scary’, you can say, ‘By jumping from the chair and rushing toward me, you made me scared.”
Instead of saying ‘You are lazy.’, you can say, ‘Whenever you skip an assignment, I need to make it up for it. It makes me feel overworked.’ So, it is advisable to focus on the deed performed by the person instead of attacking his character. Always remember that it is not the person, but simply his deed, and that can always be changed.
Option
There are two parts of the option component of BIO. In the first part, you need to provide the option as a point of reference. You are required to inform your coworker what he/she needs to start, stop or continue doing as an option for them. The option component is used as a positive, reinforcing tool. The second part refers to coaching. It is a great method that helps the employees grow personally and physically. It is more about what your coworker can do differently rather than you telling them what to do differently.
There are some more ways that can help to provide constructive feedback to your coworkers:
Practice
As it is rightly said, practice makes a man perfect, it is the best way for a successful conversation with your coworker. Take ample time to plan out how you want the conversation to go ahead. What kind of feedback do you want to deliver and how do you want it to deliver? Prepare beforehand what you are going to say. You can even seek help from a trusted colleague to provide insights into your delivery. The more you practice the better you can deliver feedback effectively.
Meet-in-person
Most of the time, you will be tempted to deliver feedback through digital channels. However, if you want to get it done smoothly, you should deliver the feedback in person. Discussing over digital channels can often lead to misunderstanding. When you and your coworker are comfortable with each other, the feedback can turn out to be more beneficial.
Don’t go personal
Most employees are open to feedback, but going personal is not a good idea. A feedback conversation should not include your opinions on how your coworkers perform their job, rather it should include fact-based observations.
Provide examples in your feedback
The more objective your feedback will be, the easier it will be for your coworker to understand. That is why it is advisable to include examples in your feedback. This way your coworker would be able to accept your feedback in a better manner. For example, instead of saying that your work is overloaded with a lot of mistakes, you can say that ‘I have been noticing a number of mistakes in your work recently. In the first article, there were 5 typos in your draft, in the second article, there were grammatical mistakes. Due to this, the project timeline gets pushed as it takes extra hours to correct those mistakes. I know you can do better, how can I help you with your editing task?’ This way using concrete information, you can provide constructive feedback to your coworkers.
Be open to providing positive feedback
If you want to ensure that your coworkers are open to feedback, deliver positive feedback as much as possible. For example, if you observe a coworker going above and beyond to get a particular job done, then you can appreciate his/her efforts so that they know their efforts don’t go unnoticed.
Constructive Feedback Helps Your Team Grow
Giving constructive feedback can help in the personal and professional development of your team which further helps your organization achieve its goals. For this, you need to frame the constructive feedback as your employees want. Once this is done, you can make use of the BIO method to provide constructive feedback the right way. This will help you and your team reap positive rewards. It will help you build a stronger team that will further help your organization go to the next level.
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Key Takeaways
- Constructive feedback refers to the feedback that is given to support individuals by identifying the weakness of the team members and developing a plan to help them overcome those weaknesses
- There are various benefits of providing feedback to the clients including improving morale, ensuring psychological safety, developing trust and accountability in the team
- Using a technique known as BIO i.e. behaviour, impact, and option is a good way to provide constructive feedback
- There are some other ways that can help to provide feedback to the coworkers including practicing more, meeting in person, not going personal, and backing the feedback with examples
- Giving constructive feedback can help in the personal and professional development of your team which further helps your organization achieve its goals
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