Giving Feedback To Employees The Easy Way

There are three parts to effective management. There are one on ones, there's feedback and then there is coaching. Regular one on one sessions will help you establish an excellent relationship with each of your employees.

In order to grow and develop your team, it is crucial to give good, clear feedback.
Firstly, I like to ask, can I give you some feedback? Sometimes someone might be having a really bad day and now is not the right time for feedback. That's fine, who knows, they might be an A player and they usually perform but one day something happened at home and it's put them in a bad mood. So I like to ask, can I give you some feedback? You want to make sure that you give them both good feedback and you give them that bad feedback.

So they're going to say, yes. They may say yes, or not now or later or something like that. If you ask a few times and they say no every time, at that point you need to say, hey, I need to give you some feedback at some point in time. You tell me when is right for you and we'll have a chat about it, but I need to talk to you about this. So you ask them, can I give you some feedback?

Then you say, when you do and then insert the behaviour, so when you don't quality test your own work, so that's when you do, insert the cause of the behaviour that you're trying to give feedback on, here is what happens. So when you don't quality check your own work, that comes back, it means another assistant now has to jump in there and double check your work, so we're doing double work and then if it filters through and it gets to the client, that makes us look bad. The client is the person who is paying us, so we need to make sure that we keep them happy.

So you're telling them, when you do this, here's what happens and then what can we do next time that is different? They might come up with something or you can provide your own advice. That's the way to give good feedback, not you're doing this wrong. No one likes to be told that way.

So coaching, A players all like to grow. I like to foster the idea that I'm going to help them grow and take them to the next level. The way that I do this is obviously in the one on ones, things float up, ok, you want to learn this and it gets noted down on the one on one. Now what you have to do and this is noted down on a one on one sheet, what is going to get done, by who and by when.

What we need to do at this point in time, let's say it's coaching. Ok, you're going to work through the coaching course about John Carlton's Simple Writing Copywriting Course, SWS. You're going to work through this, so here's what it is that you're going to do. Then you help them make a plan. Ok we're going to schedule in thirty minutes into your daily routine where you chip away at this.

Then you want them to report progress to you as well. Whenever we get anyone to review any training material, it's key that we get them to put bullet points of what it is that they learned. Otherwise we get assistants who come back and say, yes, I watched that. Oh, I was already familiar with most of the material. There's no way for us to manage what was gained out of it. So we ask them to take bullet points of what it was that they learned. That can also help when future people then start reviewing the same training material, we can use some cross checking work there as well.

Part of the training as well, we get people to go through our own DVDs, we run workshops where the team members come along and the 30 Day Challenge. There are other online membership portals for VAs.

The best bet is to Google virtual assistant training, there is a plethora of online membership programs that are designed to teach virtual assistants how to do certain things. You can sign up and your virtual assistant will go through that. It shows them how to use Gmail, it shows them how to use Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul and do a lot of the things already for you without you having to do the training. There are just plenty out there that are worth looking into.