Putting the Positive in Employee Feedback
When thinking about the topic of feedback, it is only natural to assume that the harsher the feedback, the harder to give, but that assumption might not be correct. It turns out positive feedback can be just as difficult for supervisors to deliver, due to differences in personalities and because positive feedback often gets a bad wrap as being meaningless fluff.
According to Forbes, 65% of workers say they want more feedback, but often that feedback is thought of constructive criticism or points of improvement. In reality, a recent Havard Business Review Article points to studies that have determined that the brain responds better to positive feedback. Further still, many experts tout that the target mix of positive to negative feedback should be somewhere around five to six positive comments for every one piece of constructive criticism.
I think that most supervisors, myself included, would report that their stats are, if not entirely upside down, nowhere near that. In part because negative actions are more disruptive to the workplace and therefore more easily detected, but also because praise has sometimes gotten a bad wrap.
Employees can sometimes respond to positive feedback in a very anticlimactic and sometimes downright resistant way. Many have been conditioned to feel like praise given to them in the workplace is somehow insincere, or just a precursor to the hammer dropping as part of the dreaded, to use a nicer word…crap sandwich.
And if it is not that, sometimes it is because as supervisors, we have been ineffective in delivering positive feedback there for rendering it completely useless. Sure, “keep up the great work,” might feel great, but without a higher level of detail, how is an employee supposed to know what exactly they should keep up?
Full disclosure, I used to suck at positive feedback. I was terrible, and I mean terrible at it. Partially because of the personality differences I referenced above. I am a very goal and tasked oriented person. Therefore I draw satisfaction from getting to cross an item off the to-do list. Praise feels great, but it is not what propels me forward.
So, I entered the world of being a supervisor with the incredibly erroneous assumption that if I can provide my momentum, so can everyone else. Boy was I wrong. In a very candid conversation with an employee one day, I asked her to share something that I could do that would make her job easier. Her response, “I feel like you never tell me great job today or thank you for coming in?”
Thank you for coming in? Thank you for coming in? My animal brain was going crazy over this request flashing back to the participation trophy I got for quite frankly being the worst softball play in the history of second grade. I was not going to start doing that. But then I turned down my inner cynic and decided that just as I can’t expect people to do things exactly how I would do them, I also can’t have the expectation that they respond to things exactly in the way I do.
I set out to be the kind of supervisor who was more targeted with my praise. It was hard, fighting against my hard wiring to be the kind of supervisor who showered random praise felt pretty unnatural. In fact, I had to draw on that task orientation mentality and schedule giving praise. But that didn’t work, you get to Friday the 17th and then find yourself needing to drop a piece of feedback with nothing to say. Plus I am not sure that, “hey, great job making coffee today” was the type of feedback she was looking for.
So back to the drawing board. Instead, I set targets, “ five pieces of feedback by XYZ date” and started tracking those. I also threw myself into research mode and started trying to find some tips on how to give helpful positive feedback, the kind that could make my employees feel good while also making me feel like I was providing value and not just “fluff.”
Some tips that helped me:
- Add some detail. Rather than showering employees with “good job” sharing “good job on your use of statistics to help illustrate the need in that request.”
- Linking the behavior to the business results. Now anyone who has worked with me will tell you that I love a good geek-out session about business needs and the big picture. Bringing some of that in feedback helped illustrate how one small project impacted the organization as a whole.
- Praise in public, criticize in private. Criticize in private seemed like a no brainer, but praise in public. Well when you think about it, also a no brainer. People love to be recognized, especially publically.
- Real-time feedback. Making an effort to bring it up as it happened, not waiting until a review to talk about something that they did a really great job with five months ago.
While I don’t think that positive feedback alone can eliminate the need for direct and sometimes difficult conversations. I do believe that it can help reinforce what is working well both for ourselves and our teams and help us all improve together.
It’s a tool that every supervisor needs to have in their toolkit and know how to sharpen and use to change the misconception that positive feedback is fluff. Allowing us to showcase instead what it is, a valuable strategy that capitalizes on what the human brain responds to.
