As leaders, we must make sure employees get enough information and feedback. After all, what separates strong impactful teams from others is their level of engagement with their work. Impactful teams have a clear understanding of what they need to do. Their focus is where you need it to be. They are motivated by the fact that you care enough to give them attention and support.
To give good employee feedback, you need to have a firm understanding about what is going on in your team. This requires an effective reporting solution.
I’m a strong believer that reporting should be automatic and not distract us from real work. It is very easy to get sucked into reporting hell, where your time is spent mostly on filling out reports “for feedback”. You need to make sure that your time isn’t wasted. And that your team can focus on the real work that moves your team forward.
Finding the time for feedback.
The problem with giving and receiving employee feedback is that the process might be terribly time consuming. If you had a 50 person team, and you just wanted to check in on how everyone is doing for 5 minutes, it would take 4 hours of your time.
However, most of your people require more than a 5 minute pat on the back. They might have genuine questions or concerns you need to adress to make sure they can do their work well. That means that the feedback loop has to be effective, fast, and leave you with enough time to do your own meaningful tasks.
I have learned that the key to tackling this problem is having the best possible overview of everything that is going on your my team at all times. This information also has to be in an easily consumable format so you can get an overview about everything in 5 minutes.
Staying on top of the information flow.
Weekdone is the perfect platform for automatic reporting. It let’s employees inform you on what they are doing. Without having to spend time filling out annoying, long reports. Henry Mason, Managing Director of TrendWatching told us that “automated status reports save our managers up to 4 hours a week”. In Weekdone you can see both their weekly tasks and how it relates to their long term goals. Weekdone uses an integrated combination of the Plans, Progress, Problems (PPP) weekly reporting methodology and the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) goal setting methodology for setting and tracking quarterly goals.
The benefits of employee feedback.
With Weekdone, I can decide who needs my attention the most and who just needs a pat on the back. And, I can get this information without employees spending all their time filling employee feedback reports (or me reading them).
Kaspar von Grünberg, CEO of Humanitec, told us that “In my opinion the financial benefit of Weekdone is that you just make sure there is no resource going in the wrong direction. So, let’s say a team of 3 goes the other direction for a week, then in my opinion you have 10 times more cost than Weekdone itself costs”.
How to further improve your employee feedback.
You can also take a look at Robert Half’s blog, where he gives you tips to provide better feedback to your team. He knows, feedback is a two-way communication channel. He recommends to, “keep an open mind and give your creative team members an opportunity to explain their side of the story.”
To get and give the best possible employee feedback in your team, communication is the key. Good communication with your team helps them do impactful work. Improve your team’s communication with Weekdone right now and see how big an impact it will have on your team.