Performance Feedback in the Workplace
For as many years as businesses have had employees, people have been trying to discover how to get the most out of each individual and how to keep the good ones around. Supervisors go through training after training on how to talk to subordinates, how to manage them, and how to keep them efficient. Performance feedback has been shown to be one of the most effective ways of completing this daunting task. Performance feedback has different styles and methods that can be useful in the workplace. This paper will cover some of these methods as well as the research behind how performance feedback works. Performance feedback comes in many shapes and sizes that are useful for different scenarios and purposes. The first to be discussed will be formal performance feedback which comes in two forms: intrinsic, which comes from within or from the self, and extrinsic which comes from an outside source (Kim and Hamner). Formal extrinsic feedback should be the starting point for supervisors in order to give the employee a baseline of expectations to meet. This will be written expectations that the supervisor and subordinate will go over together and discuss at great length to ensure understanding. The effect of doing so with each individual allows for a level playing field among all of the employees, and leaves no room for misinterpretation of what is required. Within this formal extrinsic feedback there should also be goals set for each individual along with the supervisor. According to Kim and Hamner this serves two different functions, serving as a directive to keep goal-directed behavior on course, and acting as an incentive to stimulate greater effort among workers (Kim and Hamner). Formal feedback should always be followed up by both informal feedback in the form of verbal praise and redirection, and as mentioned above,