It’s incredibly important to provide constructive feedback if you find your participant is lacking motivation, producing low quality work or are unable to work well with their colleagues. Equally, it’s just as important to provide positive feedback — if your participant is performing well or tackling tasks at a high level, positive reinforcement is crucial to a participant’s confidence and enjoyment for the role.
A study by PwC showed that 92% of employees believe constructive feedback delivered in the appropriate way would be extremely beneficial.
So, what’s the right approach for providing feedback? How often should you meet with your participant and how do you deliver feedback in a constructive way?
As soon as your participant starts their placement, take them through the placement experience and at what intervals during that journey they can expect feedback and discussion sessions. Set up a method that works for you and your participant — it may be weekly, fortnight or monthly. We suggest regular short catchups, with time for longer, more in depth, learning based feedback sessions. This allows for regular touchpoints so performance can be monitored and managed; and likewise, your participant can let you know of anything they are struggling with.
Feedback sessions should be a conversation. This will make the experience feel safer and the participant is more likely to open-up if they feel as though they two have a say in their experience. An open dialog can bring to light any challenges or issues a participant is facing, before they become actual problems, and provides you an opportunity to help them along the way.
We are all so busy and stretched that we often neglect to provide our teams with positive feedback, as well as constructive feedback. A little praise can go a long way to confirming to a participant that what they are doing is correct and as you wanted. Knowing this, means they can crack on with the tasks without second guessing (and in turn wasting time).
