Question

As noted in this week’s textbook chapter, employees are happier when they received regular feedback (Carpenter, Bauer, & Erdogan, 2010, p.97). Feedback takes many forms, but one of the most obvious types is feedback on performance. Managers must be able to give employees feedback on what they are doing well, and areas where an employee needs to improve. Think about times in your career when you have received feedback, and write a response that includes the following: Share an example of a time when you received effective feedback that helped you improve your performance. What made that feedback helpful? Share an example of a time when you received feedback that was not helpful. What made that feedback ineffective? Using your two examples, what can you conclude about the characteristics of effective feedback? If you were a manager, how could you use these lessons to improve the feedback you gave? Be sure that your Learning Journal entry is a minimum of 500 words.

Answer 1

Feedback about the performance of any employee is very important as it not only provides the insight of how the manager thinks about the performance level of the employee but it also facilitates the opportunity for the employee to look for those grey areas which require improvement and can be improved with the help of some monitoring and training.

Example1:- In my previous organization where I was working as an assistant marketing manager and I was responsible of fulfilling the sales target given o me and also addressing any kind of requirements and complaints raised by the target customers. In that organization, the policy of continuous appraisal was implemented which means that the employees were evaluated for their performances every month basis. Once the evaluation was done, the senior reporting manager uses to provide feedback to the employee. While working in that organization, a new manager joined the organization and I was reporting to her. As a routine, she also provided me the feedback after the completion of one month. I was so surprised to see that my new boss was very descriptive while providing me the feedback about my performance. She noted down the minute details of m performance level and also provided me with the details of how I can help myself in improving these mistakes which I was doing while doing my basic responsibilities. She advised me that before approaching any customer, I need to do a detailed analysis of the requirements of the customers and know better about the personality and the job of the target customer. This can easily be obtained from the social media platform. When I implemented these suggestions provided by her, it really and drastically improved my customer conversion rate.

Example 2:- In the same organization while working with the earlier boss, I used to receive much feedback on monthly basis but this feedback were manly more or the general statements such as improve on communication, improve services and so on. But there was no materialistic approach or points were provided to me so that I can work on it. Thus the feedbacks provided by earlier boss were not so effective and these were more of cutting the bush exercises.

From the above two examples, the traits of effective feedback about the performance of any employee can be stated as below:-

1. The feedback must have the clear objective and visions and the employee must be able to find out what was expected from her
2. The feedback must provide the gap analysis such as what was expected and what was the actual performance
3. Effective performance feedback should also provide probable remedies of the issues being encountered by the employee.
4. During the performance feedback, there must be clear and open-hearted communication between the manager and the employee so that the expectations of the manager can be understood by the employee on the other hand, how to fulfill these shortcomings can be communicated by the manager.
5. The feedback must have the well-defined performance measurement standards that are the employee must be communicated about the different standard used to evaluate the performance