The workplace needs continuous feedback more than ever. According to Gallup, only 17 percent of millennials receive meaningful feedback and 19 percent receive feedback on a routine basis. One reason such a small percentage of employees receive feedback is the perception that performance management is a time-consuming process.
We empathize with managers who attempt to balance their time between giving guidance to their direct reports, while managing the team’s overall direction and vision. It’s not easy to escape the whirlwind of tasks to review recent performance with employees. However, that doesn’t always have to be the case.
One half of the solution is the understanding that feedback doesn’t entail hour-long discussions about performance. In today’s work environment, feedback that is concise and delivered in time is effective from an employee’s perspective. These bite-sized pieces of feedback take less time to prepare, and they lead to employee engagement and motivation – instead of the annual review, which takes hours of combing through email and causes employee anxiety.
The other half is providing managers with the right tools and channels to give feedback, when the opportunity appears. This doesn’t mean piling another application onto a wall of icons on your desktop. Instead, what employees need are tools that are lightweight and accessible in their existing workflows.
At Reflektive, we designed Real-Time Feedback to address these needs. As one of the first companies to build a Real-Time Feedback plugin, the below represents our design principles, and we absolutely recommend considering them as you search for an optimal solution.
1. Designed for Employee Engagement
Product capabilities are important – but employee engagement is an absolute must. Engagement should never be underestimated. When a product is complex, employees will not understand the value proposition and will run in the other direction.
It’s important to identify a Real-Time Feedback solution that is simple and lightweight, in order to encourage employee adoption.
2. Built into Existing Workflows
A solution integrated into employee workflows elevates performance management. From past research, we discovered that users often fall into a pattern of which applications they will utilize daily. Therefore, suggesting a new application to employees is difficult because it attempts to force behavior change.
With Real-Time Feedback, we believe it’s important for it to be integrated into existing employee workflows, so that there is less friction in adoption – and employee behavior does not need to change.
At Reflektive, we integrated Real-Time Feedback into the most common applications used every day by employees: Outlook, Gmail, Slack, and Apple Mail.
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3. Integration with Reviews or Check-Ins
One of Real-Time Feedback’s biggest objectives is to enhance the traditional review process performed one to two times each year.
Instead of exposing employees and managers to recency bias or having employees spend hours digging through email for past accomplishments, a good Real-Time Feedback solution will track this information and share it within a review.
For Reflektive customers, employees have recognition saved and shared side-by-side within employee surveys. Now, time is saved when completing reviews, and managers can focus their conversations on what matters – employee development.
4. Domain Expertise
It’s crucial to find a well-built solution that has been refined by testing AND a partner that has experience with deployment. A provider that has expertise in these both areas provides dividends immediately.
Executing a great deployment for a poor solution leads to a poor outcome, and a poor deployment for a great solution is not any better.
The Bottom Line
Choosing the right Real-Time Feedback solution that fits your business and cultural objectives is a must. With the right tool, you will enhance your company’s performance management, and provide employees with a nimble, real-time solution that will fuel employee performance and development.
Learn why Reflektive’s Real-Time Feedback is different by requesting a demo here.