How Do You Give Negative Feedback?

To have a productive and profitable company you need to be able to give positive and negative feedback to your employees. It is important that you work on helping your employees know what they need to be able to improve upon. Negative feedback is a sore spot for a lot of manager and employees alike. The negative feedback you give should actually be used to help your employees grow and to become stronger in their job. You need to make sure you are focused on presenting the negative information in a positive way. This will really help your employees to know what needs to change and it will really help them to become better at their jobs and productive overall.

Hold your cool when you call the employee in and you want to address them about the issues that they are having. When you are calm and you maintain a cool edge, it can prevent people from becoming too influenced by their emotions and they will be able to maintain calm as well. You need to approach the employee kindly. You will want to be firm, but not mean. Do not allow them to manipulate your emotions to control you in any way. When you react on emotion, it often happens that you end up dealing with serious issues as you have comments and things that come out that you do not mean.

Bring the employee to a place that is quiet. You need to make sure that you are talking to them quietly and that you are not confronting them with issues in front of all their co-workers. You need to speak with your employee behind closed doors when you need to address some negative feedback. The last thing you want to do is to talk to them in front of their co-workers where they can feel embarrassed and disrespected.

The big part of giving feedback that you need to focus on is talking about the overall issue and not just one mistake made by the employee. People need to be able to understand that there are several issues that need to be addressed overall and it's not just them that needs to change. If you only focus on the person all the time, you will have a hard time being able to maintain the cool of the employee and you will end up offending them.

Prepare yourself ahead of time to be ready to give the feedback to your employees. You need to be prepared to talk to them because it can be difficult to deal with people that start to feel like they are being attacked.

Talk to the person when they are in a good mood. You don't want to give employees negative feedback at a time when they are already upset or frustrated with the company. Make sure you bring them into the office when they are in a positive mood. While you don't want to kill their buzz, you need to make sure that you are talking to them in a time when they are able to receive the information you have to say. If they are already upset, they will end up being defensive.

Compliment them and make sure you let them know how much you are appreciative of them and all the things that they do for the company. This allows people to know that you aren't just trying to point out the bad but that you also want them to see that you do have faith in them and you just want to help them become better at their job.