Looking forward to your feedback!

Giving and receiving feedback is a powerful tool at the workplace. It informs employees about their performance and behavior within the team. Without feedback, employees will get in a frustrating uncertainty that can become very demotivating. Feedback should be given and received in all directions in a hierarchy: from peers to peers, from employees to managers, from managers to employees. The purpose is to give guidance and to motivate people in reaching their goals. Giving feedback is not as easy as it may seem. If not done properly, the effect can be extremely negative: people will feel unmotivated and might even take the feedback as a personal attack.

It is commonly known that the feedback can be positive or negative. We need both of them to improve our performance even if the negative feedback is sometimes harder to accept. Both forms are ok from my point of view as long as they are constructive. Knowing how to give feedback is especially important for managers because they are the ones who need to guide and motivate the team. If they fail in giving right feedback, the performance of the whole team will suffer. What I discovered to be a very efficient way of giving feedback is the sandwich technique. In this process positive and negative feedback are offered alternatively. This way the employee will accept easier the negative comments as he will see that despite the things he needs to improve there are also things for which he is appreciated. Let’s take for example a meeting between a manager and one of his employees where the manager wants to give feedback to the employee about a specific situation.

This is the way I would see things going:

• The manager asks the employee his opinion about the situation he wants to address: “How do you think it went?”, “What did you think went well?”, “What do you wish you had done differently?”,
• The manager gives positive feedback: compliments the employee on the behavior or performance he wants to encourage and states the specific current behavior or performance that is complimented
• The manager gives negative feedback: focuses on the actions of the employee, not on the person, mentions the actions the person took or specific things said and defines positive future steps
• The manager gives positive feedback again and develops goals that the employee can work toward and explains how he will provide guidance.

Most of us are afraid of negative feedback because it is unpleasant and hard to accept. However both positive and negative feedback should be seen as sources of learning and improvement.

If we don’t receive feedback at work, we should go and ask for it. Otherwise we will lose a great chance to grow personally and professionally. 

WORK LIFE imBALANCE

For some people their job is not just a source of income but a part of who they are and therefore they will go the extra mile to get the job done even if that means constantly doing overtime, working also at home or in weekends. In the end they are so caught in their work that they almost have no time for personal life. The stress and tiredness will inevitably lead to the phenomenon called burnout. Some of us learn the importance of work life balance only after they go through or are close to exhaustion.

After almost a year of working an average of 55 hours per week, skipping lunch breaks, being available also during weekends and covering the responsibilities of 3 jobs in 2 different locations I started questioning my life style. My body was also giving me all the hints I needed that things are not ok. I could not sleep well, I started feeling burns in my stomach, I was always tired and nervous. Why did I push myself to the limits? It was not for money, that's for sure.

It all happened with a promotion, a great chance I've been given and my wish to prove that I can do a good job. This motivated me so much that I did not think anymore about my personal life and health. Getting things done and being able to deal with such high volume of work gave me a sort of energy that was making me continue in that rhythm for a quite long period of time. One night, while going at home from work I waited in the subway station for about 30 minutes because I was not realizing that I need to take the subway to go home. I was so tired that my brain must have stopped. I was just standing there staring at the subways passing one after another. When I realized what had just happened, I decided that this can't go on like this.

It's ok to be devoted to your job and to want a career, however no rewards or money could ever pay back one’s health or personal life.

A trainer told me once that it's up to us how we use our time at work. If we need to eat at our desk and at the same time do something for work that's fine. I totally disagree with that.

The lunch break should be for two things only: lunch and break from work. Only like this we will refresh and be able to concentrate for the rest of the day. When it comes to overtime, unfortunately there are many companies where working long hours is already part of the corporate culture. The managers work until late and they expect all other employees to do the same. Some employees will even start feeling bad for leaving at the end of the normal working hours.

Doing overtime can show someone's commitment to the company if it's done occasionally, in special or emergency situations. However if someone is constantly doing overtime this can be a sign of bad time management, incompetency or overloading. Working until exhaustion might have good results on short term for the company but devastating effects on medium and long term for both the company and the employee. Employees who take care of their personal life, who work normal hours, rest enough and who keep themselves healthy will be far more productive and motivated than the ones who do the opposite.

No matter the cause of work life imbalance, there is always a solution. The first step is to admit that we have a problem.

Are your emails effective?

One of the first lessons I started learning at my first job where I also had my own email address was how to communicate in written. 
I was not sure about the way I was expressing things, if I was polite enough, if my message was clear and complete. Therefore I have sent my first important emails only after they have been checked by my manager.  Due to the fact that I was responsible for the internal communication procedures of the company, I have got deeper and deeper into the subject communication at the work place.

Did you ever write an email asking for something and receiving something else? Or did you ever write an email informing about something and then receiving a whole bunch of questions on that subject? Did you have to come back with a second email with information you didn't put in your initial email? Were your emails sometimes misunderstood or ignored?

If yes, you should know that most probably it was your fault even if what we tend to do in this kind of situations is to blame the receiver of our message. 

“How could he not understand that?”, “Why do they ask this basic things?”, “Why don’t they answer to my email in time? ”, “Why did she replied so aggressive to my email? ”

All these questions should be replaced with questions like: 
“Was my mail clear enough?”, 
“Did I give all necessary details?”, 
“Did I write to the right person?”, 
“Did I mention the deadline for answering or acting in certain way?”, 
“Was my message professional?”

Every time we don’t get what we want through an email we should read it again and try to put ourselves in the shoes of the reader. If that is too hard, what works most of the time is to ask a colleague to read our message and give us feedback. I find this method useful especially when there is a risk of being involved in a conflict. Now and then we might receive emails on an aggressive tone or in which we are accused of different things. Our first natural instinct tells us to defend ourselves and reply on the same tone. However this will only bring us in a stressful situation and damage the relations with our colleagues. It might be a better idea to wait a while before answering.

What I have learned in time and what works for me is to write my first answer as it comes on the moment, save it as a draft and continue working on other things. After at least one hour I go back to the draft, I read it carefully and try to adjust it so that it’s not aggressive and that will express an objective point of view and a possible solution if that’s the case.

The premises of a team should be trust and confidence that everyone works towards reaching a common goal. Having this in mind it will be easier to presume the good intentions of our colleagues no matter the way we perceive their messages. It could very well happen that their intentions are not aggressive at all and that they just didn't pay attention at the way they expressed what they wanted.