20 phrases for better employee feedback

More and more companies are rethinking the way they provide feedback to their staff. Where a single annual review conversation used to be the norm for some time, the idea of a 360 review process is gaining traction.

In November last year, Amazon was the latest company to join big names like Accenture, IBM, and even performance review company SAP in a move away from traditional review processes. The companies are all swapping their traditional review system for a more continuous review method, arguably encouraged partly by the rise of the Millennial employee who isn't satisfied with one annual chat and not afraid to say so.

Regardless of the form, method, or frequency, at some point every manager will sit down with an employee to review how things are going. Whether they're doing a fantastic job, or have a lot of things to work on, the aim is to phrase your feedback in a way that's helpful for your employee.

To help you do that, TINYpulse compiled a list of 100 performance review phrases you can use to improve the way you provide employee feedback, based on the book Effective Phrases For Perfomance Appraisals by James E. Neal Jr.

Combined with specific data and the right examples to back them up, these phrases can help you put your thoughts and observations into words. Divided into 20 categories, we've listed our favourite phrase from each below.

• Achievement: "Excels at developing programs / strategies that have delivered X results"
• Administration: "Establishes effective systems for information retrieval through [task]"
• Coaching: "Is highly respected by employees for sharing concerns, problems, and opportunities"
• Communication Skills: "Effectively communicates expectations"
• Cooperation: "Gladly shares expertise"
• Creativity: "Clever and imaginative when confronted with obstacles"
• Delegating: "Empowers employees with the authority and resources to achieve X results"
• Improvement: "Conceives of totally new strategies"
• Innovation: "Fosters a curiosity for innovative possibilities"
• Interpersonal Skills: "Recognizes the needs of others and reaches out to lend a helping hand"
• Learning Ability: "Responds quickly to new instructions, situations, methods, and procedures"
• Management Ability: "Collaborates with individual team members to establish a development path"
• Planning: "Effectively puts plans into action"
• Potential: "Is capable of distinguished performance in a higher-level position"
• Problem solving: "Effectively solves problems rather than symptoms"
• Productivity: "Is an important contributor to the successes of the department"
• Project management: "Is transparent with a project's progress"
• Supervisory skills: "Gives consistent recognition to employees"
• Time management: "Respects the time of others"
• Vision: "Demonstrates an ability to transfer vision into execution"

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