Companies emphasize managers to provide feedback to their employees. But managers postpone the process. There can be 3 reasons in particular, why managers postpone this process.

1. One, managers don’t give feedback or don’t want to give feedback because they think that it does not bring about any major changes to employee’s work attitude.
2. Two, it is not made mandatory and so managers skip this activity.
3. Third, it is one activity that can be postponed and they feel that they’ll not be questioned for it (when ignored).

Managers should know that providing feedback is one of their KRAs

Managers have their own tasks and duties. It may be planned activities sometimes but unplanned most of the times. But managers should understand that Performance Management is also one of their core activities.

Employees actually want objective and subjective feedback for their work. Then and there they want to be corrected on mistakes and appreciated on good work. Managers should understand that their employees will feel cared and mentored when given continuous feedback. Feedback makes employees understand their requirements better and help them deliver better results.

Make Managers accountable for Employee Rating

Give Managers the complete ownership for rating his/her team members. Managers think it as a once a year process and keep postponing until the critical time. When they are made responsible for their team member’s performances and accountable to bucket employees, they’ll complete feedback cycles regularly.

HRs should educate managers to hold responsible for it

It is the sole responsibility of the HRs to make managers understand that feedback sessions are part and parcel of their everyday activities.  It is in fact one of their KPI’s is what HRs should make their managers understand.

HRs should drive the entire process. When they tend to be lenient and give ample time, the process goes never ending. HRs should allocate time for the feedback process, communicate the same to managers, and compel them to complete the feedback cycles on or before time. It should be brought to practice that managers do their feedback cycles every time on time.

Managers should be provided with tools to make things easier

Managers tend to accumulate the feedback sessions and postpone the process. Particularly, they tend to complete feedback sessions with employees who are lighter and push the cycles to later days for some difficult employees. When they are provided with tools that makes life easier, they will do it on a daily basis. When incorporating features like “CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK” & “360 DEGREE FEEDBACK”, managers will tend to be conscious and likely to provide feedback at ease. They’ll also not hesitate to provide negative feedback with tools around.

Also, the system should be able to save the previous feedback given by managers, peers, clients. Because when a new manager joins, he can refer back to the feedbacks given by the previous manager and the others. This will help him/her make better decisions.

Also, collation of previous feedbacks can resolve the recency bias that is happening in certain organizations now. Managers rank employees and bucket them based on their recent performances. This may bring issues at the work place and when highly performing employees are not recognized, they feel dissatisfied and quit their jobs.

How does automation help in giving feedback & improve the quality of reviews?

Continuous feedback can be made possible only when the performance management process is automated. The reason being, when given verbal feedback, managers may tend to forget employee’s performances over some period of time and at the time of annual reviews, this might give space for recency bias. Also, when the process of giving feedback is not mandatory, managers may skip this task giving priorities to other tasks. But when automated, the system will trigger notifications to managers to give out feedback to their employees and at the same time complete log details of the previous feedback given can be referred to at the time of annual reviews.

Tips to make managers give feedback

1. The system can be set up to send reminder emails about the feedback sessions.
2. The system can be set up to send notification emails about the feedback session for the managers to be prepared (because 1 out of 5 employees think that their bosses don’t even think about the appraisal process until they are in the room).
3. The meeting can be made really short with just 4 or 5 questions (Deloitte conducts periodic check-ins with just 4 YES/NO questions).
4. The system can be set up to send notifications to HRs after every manager’s successful completion of feedback cycles.
5. The meeting can be made mandatory – like only when the manager submits the feedback reports to his/her higher official, he/she will be called for their feedback session.