How To Give Constructive Employee Feedback

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Summary. To give constructive feedback to employees, be timely, meet privately, be clear, be specific, and be objective. You want to focus on the situation and not the person, but it still helps to establish trust and empathy with your employee to make a positive impact.

Even the best employees, from time to time, need feedback. It is only natural. An outside perspective can reaffirm expectations and refocus a person on the task at hand.

As an employer, it is your responsibility as a leader to provide effective feedback. It is the only way to ensure that you and your employees are on the same page as you work together to achieve mutual professional goals.

Key Takeaways:

Don’t forget to give your employee a chance to explain themselves.
Have solutions ready, but also ask your employee for their thoughts.
Focus on growth and support to show that you are invested in your employee’s success.
Constructive feedback can reduce turnover and increase employee engagement.

What Is Constructive Feedback?

Constructive feedback is feedback that results in positive outcomes because it focuses on support and realistic solutions. For feedback to be constructive, the person receiving the feedback has to buy into what they hear.

Constructive feedback can be either positive or negative, meaning that you can recognize good behavior or address poor behavior. In either case, you will encourage the other person that they have the potential to succeed.

How to Give Constructive Employee Feedback

To give employees feedback constructively:

Plan a private meeting. You want your employee to feel safe. If you give feedback in front of others, the employee will likely feel defensive and not fully process your words. A private meeting allows both of you to speak openly without the interference of others.
Establish trust. An employee is more likely to listen to you if you make it clear you are on their side. This has to come from more than just words. Your actions before, during, and after the feedback must prove your commitment to your employee’s success.
Be clear and specific. Don’t leave anything to miscommunication or misinterpretation. Make sure the employee understands what you are saying and why you are saying it. What’s more, by being specific, your employee you can tie your feedback to specific outcomes that the employee can work towards.
Provide objective observations. You are in the middle of the problem-solving process. Use your feedback to highlight behavior that does not assume or draw any unfounded conclusions. This helps the other person feel less defensive and more open to your comments.
Give the employee an opportunity to respond. Your employee may want the chance to defend themselves. Give this to them so that you don’t base your feedback on incorrect or unfair assumptions. It also allows your employee to feel they were treated fairly.
Share your perspective and needs. This is where you bring in your commentary. You want to show that your goal is not to attack your employee but to reveal your own thoughts and feelings about how their behavior affects you, the company, and possibly others.
Ask for and provide solutions. Your employee has to feel invested, so work together to come up with solutions. Give your employee a chance to suggest some, but don’t rely on their answers. As a leader, you need to have your own solutions. Consider all solutions and pick one that meets your needs.
Conclude with a positive focus on future action items. Don’t just give your employee feedback and leave them out to dry. Send them off on the right trajectory with something they can work on. Use SMART goals that can help increase motivation.
Follow up. Finally, after you give constructive employee feedback, let them know you plan to follow up. Observe how your employee progresses and, in time, share your thoughts. Whether it is positive or negative, your follow-up is crucial to establishing trust for future feedback.

11 Tips for Giving Constructive Feedback to Employees

Be timely. Feedback is most effective when given near the time of the behavior. This is because it remains fresh in everyone’s mind. This doesn’t necessarily mean you should give feedback right away. You still need to give yourself time to process and plan what you want to say. Additionally, be mindful if the employee might be too emotional to accept feedback.
Meet in person or face-to-face. If possible, give feedback in person, or at least over a video chat, because it creates a conversation where you build a connection with your employee. An email, text, letter, or voicemail would come across as impersonal, which limits outcomes.
Be authentic. Show your employee that you are not putting up a front or lying to them. Your authenticity is key to opening up your employee’s willingness to listen to you. It makes your feedback carry more weight because you are invested in your employees.
Focus on growth. For feedback to be constructive, it needs to build towards something specific. Decide with your employee what that goal is and keep everything framed towards progress. See opportunities in a challenge and embrace change.
Focus on the situation, not the person. It is helpful to stay objective by keeping your feedback limited to the actions and behavior, not the identity of the person. Make it clear you see the situation as a problem that can be solved.
Be mindful and keep your emotions in check. Emotions can run high in feedback sessions. This is true even for you. Observe and recognize when your emotions appear, allow them to exist internally, but then return to a focus on specific, objective commentary.
Keep it simple. Do not overwhelm your employee, even if you have multiple behaviors you want to address. Prioritize your feedback on a limited amount of observations and solutions. Then, in the future, address further behavior if necessary.
Balance positives and negatives. Your conversation should contain both positive and negative feedback so that your employee understands your objectivity. Negative feedback especially needs to be softened with some positives so that employees can feel good about themselves.

Even if everything is positive, provide at least some feedback that addresses the potential for change or new opportunities to consider.
Use empathy and active listening. When you are empathetic with your employees, you can consider how they might react to your feedback. With active listening, you can fully understand their position, which helps you make more informed decisions.
Be consistent and frequent. How you give feedback should be the same with all your employees so that none of them feels targeted. Additionally, you will want to stick to what you say in your feedback sessions. Try to give feedback periodically to normalize the interaction with employees.
Focus on professional needs. Let the employee know that your needs as an employer and their needs as an employee share many similarities. If you focus on these, then you can reinforce the idea that your feedback is for mutual success.

The Benefits of Constructive Employee Feedback

Constructive employee feedback is very important to creating a healthy, productive workplace. Feedback is always necessary when managing other people, but making it constructive adds additional benefits such as:

Clarifies expectations and observations. Sitting down with your employees and reviewing their behavior gives you a chance to clear up any misunderstandings. At a feedback session, you also have the opportunity to establish expectations for the future, which gives you and your employee a shared set of standards to work towards.
Improve employee engagement and morale. Employees who feel like their employers don’t care about them are less likely to be engaged. They may take a “why bother?” attitude when they consider how their actions affect their employer.

Setting up constructive feedback sessions allows you to show your employees you care about their success. Your employees know they are being monitored and so will make necessary adjustments to achieve professional goals.
Reduce turnover. Employees who feel blindsided by unexpected reprimands or ignored in their professional development will be easier targets for turnover. Constructive feedback reduces this by providing proactive support to employees.
Provide new perspectives. You might learn something when you give your employees a chance to speak in a feedback session. Whether it’s an explanation for their behavior or a possible solution to change results, your employees give you a chance to see your challenges from a new angle.
Sustainable results. Constructive feedback provides solutions that are less threatening and more inviting, which means you are more likely to see the results you want in your employees.
Strengthen organizational cohesion. Constructive feedback helps solidify the relationship between you and your employees. It establishes respect and goals for mutual success.

Examples of Constructive Employee Feedback

Here is an example of giving constructive feedback to an employee who is constantly late to meetings.

“Johnathan, first off, I want to thank you for meeting with me. You are a hard worker, and I know that your time is valuable. I am always impressed with your dedication, particularly last week when you worked on two sales campaigns simultaneously.

I brought you in today, however, to talk about your punctuality. I have noticed over the last month that you have been late to each one of our weekly meetings. Why is that?”

[Employee response]

“I understand and can imagine that it is difficult to get off sales calls in time. However, our weekly meetings are important. They give the entire team a chance to review current projects and plan for the future. It takes time out of everyone’s day, so we try to keep them as brief as possible.

I’m afraid you have been missing out on some crucial information that will help make your current sales data project run more smoothly. I know that’s been a challenge for you, and I want to give you more time to work on other projects that you find interesting. What can we do to solve this?”

[Employee response]

“I agree. I think you need to schedule more time between your sales calls and your meeting. I suggest giving yourself a 30-minute buffer. Let’s try that over the course of the next month and see how you do.”

Employee Feedback FAQ

What are the steps to giving constructive feedback?

The steps to giving constructive feedback are:
- Meet privately
- Establish trust
- Be clear and specific
- Be objective in your observations
- Listen to the employee respond
- Share your thoughts
- Come up with solutions
- Focus on future action items
- Follow up
By working through these steps, you and your employee can turn the feedback sessions into a collaborative approach to achieving shared professional goals.
What are the key features of constructive feedback?

The key features of constructive feedback are:
- Support. Your employee needs to understand that your feedback is to help them achieve some sort of professional goal, usually one that you both share. This is because when your employees succeed, you, as an employer, succeed.
- Specific. Feedback is less helpful when it is vague. Specifics allow your employee to focus on certain items or behaviors that need adjustments.
- Clarity. Be direct in your feedback so that your employee does not misunderstand or misinterpret what you say.
- Objectivity. Don’t make or take things personally. Focus on the objective behavior of your employee and work towards that.
- Actionable solutions. Constructive feedback allows your employee to use the feedback in a useful way. Make this easier for them by providing action items that can be the focus of future evaluations.
What is the golden rule of feedback?

The golden rule of feedback is to be timely and specific. This is because feedback is more useful when it is given around the time of the behavior.

The feedback that is not timely will have less of an impact, especially if your employee has a hard time remembering whatever behaviors you want to discuss. Specifics in feedback are important because they provide focus to the conversation.
How do you give critical feedback effectively?

To give critical feedback effectively, you need to:
- Have the other person’s trust
- Be specific and objective
- Let the other person respond
Without these features, your critical feedback will likely cause the other person to become defensive. Once they are defensive, it will be harder for them to listen and respond positively to your observations and suggestions.

References

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Author

Conor McMahon

Conor McMahon is a writer for Zippia, with previous experience in the nonprofit, customer service, and technical support industries. He has a degree in Music Industry from Northeastern University and in his free time he plays guitar with his friends. Conor enjoys creative writing between his work doing professional content creation and technical documentation.