How Do You Make Job Performance Feedback Useful?
Unless you work by yourself, at sometime or another, you’ll have to give feedback about how someone else is doing in their job. Having worked with people from all over the world, one constant challenge is providing feedback that people understand and can use. We all have feedback, opinions and observations about our co-workers. Some of it is positive and some of it isn’t. The challenge is for us to convey our impressions in words and examples people can use. The goal of this article is to give some ideas on how we can provide the information needed to help others grow and improve. For feedback to be useful, we all have to understand what it means. Saying “John was helpful” is nice, but what does that mean to you? Or, what does that mean to John? A better way to say this might be, “John’s contribution of 6 hours to my project helped me finish it ahead of schedule.” Feedback needs to be measurable. Consider this, “Jane is always late.” What if Jane is on-time part of the time? A more acc
