One of the most important responsibilities of any technology manager involves giving their direct reports meaningful feedback. It plays a key role in keeping your team confident, and focused on staying productive. Failure to offer feedback in a timely manner runs the risk of tanking employee morale and potentially your company’s retention rate as well.
Let’s look more closely at a few strategies aimed at providing your team the feedback they actually need. Leverage these concepts to keep your company’s overall productivity level as high as possible.
Real Time Feedback is Essential
The time-honored tradition of setting yearly goals and tracking employee progress towards their achievement still adds some value in the IT world. Increasingly however, millennial tech professionals want feedback as quickly as possible.
So make the effort to provide real time feedback to your team especially when in the middle of a project. This approach is especially compatible when using an Agile/DevOps management philosophy. It helps keep confidence at its highest while ensuring any problems get handled quickly.
Ensure Any Criticism Stays Constructive
When giving negative feedback to an employee, make sure it’s framed in a constructive manner. Detail the specific issue and worth with the person to create an action plan to fix things moving forward. Once again, specifics are vital so your employee fully understands what they need to do.
A one-on-one meeting is important when first detailing the problem, but also document the issue in writing for future reference. Never verbally criticize any employee in front of their coworkers. Be sure to keep things positive to inspire a better effort, instead of lowering the employee’s morale.
Focus on the Employee’s Actions – Not their Personality
Try to limit any feedback to the specific actions of your employee; not necessarily their personality or other vague generalizations. Remember, the ultimate goal involves inspiring them to reach higher levels of productivity. As such, attacking their personality only serves to alienate someone your company has already invested greatly when it comes to their hiring, onboarding, and training.
Focusing on actions and behavior also remains an important aspect of providing constructive criticism. Be sure to remember these complimentary concepts whenever it comes time to offer real time feedback or even during a periodic formal review.
Take Action Today
When you need additional insights on building a top notch tech team, talk to the experts at Synerfac. As one of the top IT staffing agencies in the country, we provide great candidates able to help your organization succeed. Schedule some time with us soon!