What Is Feedback Training? Who It’s For and Why It’s Important

Giving and receiving feedback does not always come easily or naturally. In fact, you might be surprised just how many people need feedback training to learn how to do it in the workplace with any degree of success.

Whether you’re thinking about improving your feedback skills or upskilling a team of people at your organization, this article contains the basics of feedback training, including the definition, benefits, and the different types available to you. If that’s the information you’re looking for, then let’s begin.

What Is Feedback Training?

In the workplace, feedback training is used to teach individuals how to give and receive feedback in a professional, respectful, and constructive manner. Topics covered will often include:

• The difference between positive vs. negative feedback
• The difference between good (constructive) vs. bad (destructive) feedback
• Popular feedback models (Feedback sandwich, TAG method)
• How to plan feedback
• How to manage emotions when giving or receiving difficult feedback
• How to deliver feedback based on the recipient (boss vs. peer)
• The importance of self-awareness
• The importance of active listening

Bear in mind, though, that it is beneficial for feedback training to be specifically tailored to the unique needs of an audience. For example, feedback training for managers will focus more on the nuances of delivering employee feedback, while feedback training for employees will focus on navigating peer feedback. As you can imagine, this makes the content feel more relevant to the learner and increases the chances that they will actually take what they have learned, and apply it in their everyday lives at work and beyond.

The Benefits of Feedback Training

If you’re going to invest time, energy, and money into a feedback training program for either yourself or your team, you want to know that it’s worth it. While there are always several contributing factors to the success of training, the potential benefits of feedback training include:

• Increased Engagement: Feedback training aims to teach individuals how to deliver meaningful feedback. This is good, seeing as those who have received "meaningful feedback" in the past week are nearly 4x more likely to be engaged at work than those who didn’t.
• Reduces Turnover: People who received low-quality feedback at work are 63% more likely to quit than everyone else. Fortunately, feedback training teaches individuals what it takes to deliver better, more high-quality feedback.
• Drives Motivation: It has been found that affirmation, feedback, and rewards are the most effective ways to motivate employees to do their best work.
• Improves Performance: Employee training teaches individuals how to give and receive critical feedback so they don’t fear it. This is important because people believe corrective feedback does more to improve their performance than positive feedback by a three-to-one margin.
• Supports Retention: Feedback training encourages individuals to offer frequent feedback rather than holding onto it, which is good since people who receive frequent feedback at work are 3x less likely to seek out other jobs or apply to them and 1.4x more likely to stay at their current organization. For leaders, learning how to use feedback effectively allows them to guide their teams toward continuous improvement while also improving their own leadership skills.

10 Skills Taught In Feedback Training

Giving and receiving feedback is a skill that is made up of many other interpersonal skills. As such, feedback training courses will often focus on teaching the following ten feedback skills:

1. Communication: Communication skills are essential to giving and receiving feedback as they allow one to articulate their thoughts, observations, and suggestions in a way that minimizes ambiguity and maximizes understanding.
2. Self-Awareness: Giving and receiving feedback requires a high level of self-awareness. This allows individuals to recognize and regulate their own biases, emotions, and communication styles, which in turn leads to more constructive and mindful feedback conversations.
3. Emotional Intelligence: Given that feedback can evoke an emotional response in the workplace, it’s important to have a degree of emotional intelligence that allows one to understand, manage, and navigate their emotions in the moment.
4. Professionalism: Maintaining a level of professionalism is key when giving and receiving feedback in the workplace. Therefore, one must have the skills needed to communicate with respect, courtesy, and tact.
5. Empathy: Empathy refers to the ability to understand the perspectives, feelings, and experiences of others and respond accordingly. This is important in regard to feedback because while you might not agree with what someone says, you must make an effort to understand where they are coming from.
6. Listening: To give and receive feedback, listening skills are necessary as they help one achieve a deeper understanding of the intended message.
7. Problem-Solving: When feedback is related to a problem, mistake, or setback, problem-solving skills can allow one to identify solutions more quickly and often in a more collaborative way.
8. Relationship Building: No one wants to deliver or receive feedback in such a way that it ruins an otherwise positive working relationship. For this reason, relationship-building skills and feedback go hand-in-hand.
9. Collaboration: Feedback isn’t meant to be a one-sided thing. Ideally, it will kickstart a two-way conversation and open the door for the giver and recipient to collaborate together on a win-win solution.
10. Conflict Resolution: When feedback is difficult to give or hear, there is always the chance of conflict arising. Fortunately, conflict resolution skills can help one de-escalate a situation and address points of contention diplomatically.

How To Train People to Give and Recieve Feedback

When you haven’t received any training, giving and getting feedback can feel intimidating and uncomfortable. Fortunately, feedback training is designed to make it less so by building the confidence and competence of every learner so that they leave the virtual or physical classroom feeling capable of doing it themselves.

Whether this is something you need for yourself or a team of people, there are a few feedback training options that training partners, like the team at Niagara Institute, typically offer for individuals and groups.

Feedback Training for Managers

Feedback training for managers equips those in people management positions with the skills and tools needed to deliver constructive and motivating feedback to employees, peers, and bosses, as well as receive it from those individuals. It will cover a variety of topics, including active listening techniques, empathy, and the art of framing feedback positively so that managers feel capable of delivering feedback that enhances team performance, boosts morale, and cultivates a culture of continuous improvement.

Feedback Training for Employees

Feedback training for employees equips individual contributors with the skills needed to receive, process, and apply constructive feedback from their bosses, peers, and clients and deliver feedback to those individuals. The focus is typically on helping individuals develop a growth mindset, practice active listening, and prioritize self-awareness. By teaching this, employees leave the feedback training course feeling empowered to leverage feedback as a catalyst for personal and professional development.