If you’re waiting for quarterly or annual reviews to provide your employees valuable feedback, you may be doing a disservice to your employees and your company. While you don’t have to take your employees for coffee every day to review their progress, it’s important to provide them with feedback on a regular basis. Providing feedback can keep employees focused, motivated and gives them a sense of truly belonging to the company. As a result, they may be more inclined to contribute to your company’s overall growth and success.

Check Your Attitude
Giving employees feedback isn’t always an exciting task for a manager. When an employee performs poorly on a task, or isn’t meeting his goals, you may not be in the best mood when you sit down to provide feedback. Check your attitude first to ensure that you’re ready to provide honest, constructive feedback. This way, you can avoid conflict and accomplish more.

Find a Way to Communicate
Feedback doesn’t always have to be a sit down conversation. Sometimes, a simple email to say “thanks” or to recognize contributions to a project are enough to show employees that you appreciate their efforts. Email is a great tool when providing good feedback, but if an employee’s performance is unfavorable, avoid sending an email, since it’s easy to misinterpret the tone of a message.

Emails, instant messages and handwritten letters don’t have the same effect as old fashioned, face-to-face communication. Schedule a coffee meeting, invite your employee out to lunch or schedule an in-office meeting when you want to provide feedback. If that feels too formal, stop by your employees desk to say, “great job in the meeting today” or “the report you gave me covered everything I needed” or just to say “thank you for your contributions”.

Be Direct and Specific
Give it to your employees straight and leave the fluff behind. Your employees will respect and appreciate your feedback more, if you’re direct and able to provide them with specific examples. General statements about performance won’t help employees make improvements.

Give Suggestions
Not only do your employees want to hear how you feel about their performance, they’d also like to know how they can make improvements. Offer recommendations that will help employees grow and advance within the company.