Effective Employee Feedback
Providing feedback to your employees is crucial to nurturing the employment relationship. It opens the lines of communication between managers and employees which helps to improve employees’ performance. A study by Gallup found that employees are two times as likely to be disengaged if they feel ignored by their manager. Feedback is an important aspect in every phase of the employee life cycle, from hiring to off boarding of an employee. However, managers sometimes shy away from giving feedback because talking about an employee’s performance can be very uncomfortable. Human Resources plays a vital role in helping organizations be more receptive to feedback for each of the following stages of the employee lifecycle.
Recruitment
To ensure the recruitment process is effective, it is important for Human Resources to receive feedback from both candidates and hiring managers. Hearing from management helps ensure the recruitment process is meeting the organization’s talent needs. Feedback from candidates helps improve the recruitment process by revealing the strengths and weaknesses of that process.
Onboarding
Asking for feedback early in an employee’s time with your organization will help set them up for success and instill a culture of trust and openness in your workplace. HR and hiring managers are responsible for making sure employees learn all the required skills to effectively do their jobs. Feedback is essential during this stage as employees are learning about your organization’s policies, procedures, their job duties and undergo training. This includes following-up with employees to confirm learning is on target, on schedule, and in alignment with your organization’s needs and goals. Receiving feedback early on will help new employees to understand their role and begin to make a positive contribution to your company. To ensure a successful onboarding process, remember to create a formal document that includes procedures and guidelines.
Performance & Development
During this stage of the employee life cycle, employees are given feedback through performance evaluations, one-on-one check-ins and meetings. Setting performance standards, providing feedback, and conducting evaluations allows your organization to attain the best results through managing employee performance. Human resources plays a vital role in this process by ensuring it is fair, accurate and managed appropriately. HR also conducts performance management system training for managers to make sure it is being utilized properly and that mangers are rating each employee based on the same criteria. HR can also act as a mediator for any troubled relationships that may exist between employees and managers.
Feedback should also be given to employees regularly through ongoing conversations, coaching and training. Do not wait for an annual performance review to give feedback. Effective feedback is well timed so that the employee can easily connect the feedback with their actions. To motivate employees, feedback should be given when an employee performs well and praise should be personalized with timely examples of these behaviours.
Retention
Once an employee is integrated into your organization and understands their role, it is important to retain the employee and ensure the employee is engaged. Continuous stretch assignments, recognition and training are critical at this stage. HR professionals can help your organization to attain feedback about compensation, benefits, rewards, and recognition. They can help ensure your organization’s offering is internally fair and externally competitive through employee satisfaction surveys. HR can also use talent management software to monitor continued learning and succession planning to identify candidates to promote.
Offboarding
When an employee is exiting the organization because of a new job, retirement, layoff, personal reasons or termination, HR is responsible to follow proper procedures and documentation. Offboarding is essential in helping your organization to maintain a strong corporate brand and gain valuable feedback from departing employees. This information can help your organization to better retain current employees and improve the HR processes.
Feedback is important in every stage of the employee lifecycle. If your organization wants to transform its performance to a high-performing culture, HR must be involved to help implement an effective employee feedback mechanism for every phase of the employee lifecycle. Reach out to MaxPeople for assistance implementing an effective feedback system, tools and processes in your organization.