How to Ask for Feedback That Will Help You Improve

People dread receiving and giving feedback, however there is no doubt that including feedback as part of your work process will fundamentally improve the way your employees work. Therefore, it is vital your employees are in a position, where they can comfortably ask for feedback, so as to develop a good organizational culture of performance improvement.

There are a couple of ways you can ask for feedback that will help you improve:

Honest feedback

Be direct that you are looking for honest feedback, no matter how brutal it may be, but keep it constructive and choose the words carefully depending on the personality of your employee. What is the best approach to communicate the feedback? This way you can get the most out of the conversation.

Note taking

Take notes on everything that is said, offer silence as a response to garner further information. The notes that you take during the meeting can then be referred to in the future when taking on new tasks etc. Look towards the future: You need to ask the questions on how you can improve in the future rather than focusing on what you did wrong in the past. This also proves to be more effective in ascertaining honest opinions that will be highly valuable.

Listen

Try to avoid making a judgement on the feedback you are being given, you are looking to attain as much information as possible. If you react negatively it may damage the authenticity and further usefulness of the feedback. Make sure you listen to your employees and try to see things from their perspective.

Dig deep

Take the opportunity to push their answers, ask multiple times in different ways to give more opportunities for honest feedback.

Furthermore, in order to really develop your performance within a company, you need to receive feedback often. Therefore, its vital to turn it into a habit rather a dread. Take time, on a regular basis to have one-on-one conversations with colleagues about issues, challenges, opportunities and strategy. We would advise a to do this once weekly or once every two weeks at the least. This way you can improve the way you work, improve the employee-manager relationships, develop your employee engagement levels.