Performance Feedback
Performance feedback has already become a popular means of measuring the quality of employee performance in organizations. Whether negative or positive, performance feedback provides a timely and objective reaction to the way each employee is coping with his workplace tasks. Although performance feedback has always been a reliable tool of taking administrative decisions, its effects stretch to cover a whole set of organizational processes and operations. Given the organizational significance of performance feedback, it is essential that managers realize the impact, which performance feedback may produce on employees, as well as the rules and principles, to which they are to adhere in order to make performance feedback a reliable driver of employee motivation.
In her short article, Andra Picincu (2009) provides an insight into the rules and principles, which organizations must follow when developing their systems of performance feedback. It appears that simply informing employees about their progress is not enough; performance feedback should be efficient enough to give employees a sense of motivation and to ensure that employees understand the essence and sources of their failures. Picincu (2009) suggests, that performance feedback should be offered as soon as possible after an action; to provide timely feedback means to balance the interests of both an employee and an organization. Furthermore, whether performance feedback is made in public or in private depends on its quality: expressing criticism in public is inappropriate and goes against the simplest principles of motivation (Picincu, 2009). Performance feedback should turn into a continuous (or at least, repetitive) measure of communicating performance results to employees; they should get used to the fact that regular performance feedback is an essential component of their relationships with management (Picincu, 2009). That these rules are important for the quality of organizational performance is obvious, but why is performance feedback valued so much by organizations and individual employers?
The truth is in that efficient performance feedback affects all aspects of organizational performance. First of all, performance feedback helps people “fine-tune their behaviors and also tells them when they are getting off track” (Cherniss & Goleman, 2001). Where people can evaluate the progress they are making with specific workplace tasks and where they can also identify the issues they face in the process of achieving the basic organizational objectives, they are more likely to succeed in coping even with most complicated aspects of workplace performance. Second, performance feedback is a reliable tool of motivation, and when done efficiently, it significantly increases the level of encouragement and support employees get when approaching their goals and objectives. As such, a good performance feedback can initiate and sustain continuous change in organizations (Liff & Posey, 2004). As long as organizations can engage in developing effective performance feedback systems, and as long as they can operate the rules of providing efficient performance feedback, employees will be more likely to stay with the organization and to work for the benefit of its organizational goals and results.
It should be noted, that although performance feedback was traditionally viewed as the instrument of taking relevant administrative decisions, the scope of performance feedback functions in organizations has significantly increased. Currently, performance feedback is an effective instrument of reducing uncertainty among employees. Performance feedback works in a way that positions it among the major drivers of better individual performance in organizations. Efficient performance feedback is impossible without an efficient system of organizational goals and objectives, to which this performance is to be tied. As a result, performance feedback can become a good indicator of the overall organizational performance at workplace.
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