Successful teams are made up of individuals with unique ambitions, strengths, and personalities. The secret to being a great leader is the ability to identify and leverage these differences to create a complementary and motivated workforce.
To date, managers have successfully used Impraise to review each team member’s past feedback and goals prior to 1-on-1s and Reviews, resulting in more insightful performance conversations. With our latest update, we’ve added Private Notes which allow managers and employees to go even deeper by recording notes on 1-on-1 conversations, post-review reflections, and important insights and observations about each individual.
Only visible to you, private notes can act as a personal profile created by you, for each member.
For example, you can document:
While it’s important to remember what was discussed in your meeting last week, it’s also essential that your notes help you to keep up to date with changes over time. Keeping in mind, that as your team members grow and develop, their coaching needs will also evolve.
Rather than relying on memory to retain important insights you learn about each individual, make notes of the key points you discussed.
Review these notes before your next 1-on-1, leading you to richer, more insightful conversations. See what the best managers are asking their employees during 1-on-1s for more inspiration.
Performance reviews shouldn’t be a one time event, where people receive feedback and move on. There should time to reflect and reassess how you and your team have grown and to build an action plan for what you will continue to do or improve.
Reviews can also be used to gain deeper insights into employee strengths. According to a study by Gallup, people who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged, 8% more productive and 15% less likely to quit their jobs. In addition, knowing your team members’ strengths will enable you to leverage the unique skill sets in the most effective way.
After each review, set time aside to help each team member analyze and discover their strengths. If you don’t know where to start, use the hidden strengths functionality in Impraise to pinpoint strengths each individual may be unaware of.
Here are a few questions to facilitate further reflection:
Aside from strictly career focused exchanges, Google found that one of the top three things their best managers did was to express an interest in their personal well being.
This doesn’t mean you have to know the intimate details of your employee’s last check-up, but it is important to know that they prefer having the morning for high concentration tasks and the afternoon for meetings. Or that they value public recognition of their achievements. Show that you listen, pick up on, and care about creating an environment for them to succeed is a sure way to get your team to go the extra mile for you.
Giving constructive feedback is hard. Keeping in mind that everyone prefers to receive and give feedback in different ways, follow a few simple rules to make sure your feedback is delivered effectively. When giving constructive feedback you want to:
While written feedback gives you time to formulate what you want to say, it can often be difficult to recall specific details when giving feedback in person. Use Private Notes to collect insights to better prepare and remind yourself of the questions you would like to ask when sharing feedback, and additional comments or context you would like to provide.
We hope Private Notes will spark some ideas as you continue to develop as a manager and coach your team effectively.
Click here to learn how you can use Private Notes as apart of Light-weight Check-ins.
Keep teams on the same page. Impraise helps managers and individuals maintain alignment with lightweight check-ins.
Industry experts like Josh Bersin of Deloitte confirm that performance management has really been about feedback all along—we just haven’t been doing it right. Learn why.
Understand the challenges managers face and explore practical tips you can use unlock and improve the employee experience for everyone at your company.
Atlassian has a strong culture of feedback which they have maintained as they scale. Understand how strong company values, peer-to-peer feedback and more all contribute to why they are constantly nominated for best place to work.
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