How can you get the very best out of your content team? Sure, you could invest in countless courses and fly them to every available seminar. While these tactics have their place, simply scheduling consistent feedback sessions can have a much greater impact than you might think. Continue reading to discover the benefits of constructive feedback and how to deliver it successfully to help your team ascend to new heights of productivity.
Why Is Feedback Important for Your Content Team?
When it comes to creating content, from expertly written blogs to captivating videos and podcasts, proper feedback plays a crucial role. Communicating the right words at the right time provides clear direction and helps writers, editors, and other creative professionals strive towards continuous improvement in their respective fields. Not only does constructive feedback enhance the performance of individuals, but it also lubricates the cogs of the entire team, ensuring seamless operations across your entire workforce. Execute feedback sessions well, and hold them frequently, and you’ll chip away at faults and errors, leaving consistency, reliability, and autonomy in their place.
However, to reap the benefits of providing feedback to your team, you need to handle things professionally. Weak, destructive, and inconsistent feedback can cause more harm to your team’s performance than good. Being indirect, vague, and overly harsh can damage team cohesion and working relationships, ultimately culminating in scenarios such as missing key deadlines and providing subpar services to your clients. To help you nail your feedback sessions and see the positive results for yourself, we’ve put this blog together to highlight the most important parts of the process.
The Benefits of Giving Regular Feedback
Before we get into the details of how (and how not) to deliver feedback to your content creation team, it’s worth learning the benefits of doing so. Once you’re aware of just how positively it can impact employee performance and your business as a whole, you’ll do everything in your power to make it a regular occurrence in your working schedule. Here are some of the key benefits to consider.
- Enhances performance: You should take time to praise your team members on their strong points during a feedback session. However, by focusing on their weak areas too, you’ll expose their blind spots and instruct them as to where they need to improve. Doing so will inevitably improve their overall performance as a content creator.
- Builds confidence: When delivered in a constructive manner, feedback will boost the confidence of your team. Why? Because once you point out an area that needs improving, they’ll get to work making things right. As that individual realises that they’ve overcome a challenge and sees improvement in their own work, their confidence will naturally rise.
- Encourages content creators: Focus on areas where members of your team are excelling in their creativity and performing well. Recognise the unique perspectives and ideas that they bring to the table, and you’ll encourage them to proceed in their strong areas with unrivalled confidence.
- Boosts team cohesion: When working in a team, the quality of the creative content depends largely on how well individual members work together. If you detect confused communications or conflict among specific members, feedback sessions are a great time to reconcile them and enhance team cohesion as a whole.
- Aligns expectations: You can’t expect your content creation team to produce what you’re after if you don’t make your expectations clear in the first place. Use feedback sessions to make clear objectives, timelines, goals, and roles known to your content team, and you’ll reap the rewards.
Giving frequent feedback to your content creation team comes with myriad benefits. You’ll experience improved performance, better teamwork, and superior project outcomes.
How to Give Constructive Feedback to Team Members
You’re now aware of the benefits of providing regular feedback to your content team. But how exactly should you go about delivering it? “Feedback culture” certainly has some negative connotations. Some content creators feel like they’re being called into the head teacher’s office to receive a telling-off, whereas others view feedback sessions as fruitless, directionless, and a waste of time. Well, it’s time for you to turn this association on its head and make feedback sessions and performance reviews a productive and enjoyable endeavour. Learn how to pull this off below.
Set Time Aside Specifically for Feedback
Don’t fall into the trap of getting too relaxed about giving feedback to your team. It’s an important task that requires care and attention. Quickly exchanging words on the commute to work or while standing in line to grab a coffee won’t produce the desired results. Instead, properly schedule regular feedback sessions in your working week. Ideally, have team members come into your office to chat face to face. If your team works remotely, a dedicated video call will suffice. Booking a time slot will give the session a professional feel. Your team members will get the feeling that these moments of constructive criticism are important, both for their career development and for the business as a whole.
Be Specific
Providing vague feedback is similar to giving your team a map without any directions. Pointing out overarching patterns in a content creator’s work that need fixing can certainly get them moving in the right direction, but being precise and to the point will help to remedy any problem much quicker. You’ll make it clear where they can improve and also give them instructions to help them reach the desired change.
For example, don’t just say, “I’ve noticed the introductions to your blogs are lacking what’s needed to retain reader attention, please work on that”. Instead, say something like, “When writing your introductions, I want you to really focus on highlighting problems and asking thought-provoking questions to grab the reader’s attention. Try adding anecdotes and quotes into these next few pieces, and don’t forget about surprising statistics and working on mental imagery”.
Provide Clarity
While being specific will help your team members realise what they need to improve on, clarity will help them to comprehend exactly what you’re asking. Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t speak in indirect terms and phrases to be overly polite and passive. Keep things constructive, say exactly what you mean in simple terms, and always try to push the individual into the direction of growth and progression, instead of unintentionally bringing them down. Here’s one really easy way to guarantee clarity during your constructive criticism: ask the listener if they understand what you’re asking of them. If they say “yes”, ask them how they’re going to put what you’ve just said into practice during their next blog, podcast, video, etc. If what they say sounds identical to what you asked, you’re both good to go.
Encourage Problem-Solving
Constructive criticism and feedback sessions can devolve into micromanagement, a behaviour that many creatives, in particular, loathe. However, too much freedom can also skew expectations and cause an individual to diverge from the project brief. With firm boundaries in place to prevent this from happening, give your team members the responsibility and initiative to solve the inevitable problems that crop up during the content creation process. This will help them become more experienced, autonomous, and creative. So, take a chance to get each member’s feedback during your feedback sessions. Ask questions like, “What are some ways we can improve our SEO strategy?”, and, “How do you think we can rewrite this article to make it more engaging?”.
Hold Team Members Accountable
Accountability breeds responsibility. Without proper accountability, your team won’t grow, and they’ll often fail to meet your expectations. When delegating tasks, ensure that each team member has a clear understanding of your expectations, the deadlines set, and the quality of work required. During your feedback sessions, you’ll have dedicated time to fill in your team on how you think they’re performing and where they think they can improve. Keeping them accountable, you can discuss any incidents that may have cropped up, and ask them what they think needs to happen to avoid similar events from happening in the future. Over time, you can increase the amount of responsibility and accountability in those who thrive more under pressure, and reel it in a little for those who don’t.
Follow Up
Providing feedback and constructive criticism to your content creation team isn’t a one-and-done occurrence. Plus, you shouldn’t start from scratch during each session. Instead, closely keep track of what you discussed last time, and make an effort to follow up and see if the individual has taken on board what you said—and actually put it into practice. If so, start to work on other areas. If not, discuss any troubles they might be having and help them figure out ways to smash the goals you’ve set for them.
There are several ways to enhance the effectiveness of feedback sessions. These include putting aside dedicated time, encouraging problem-solving in your team, and following up regularly.
Examples of Professional Feedback
Before you start scheduling feedback sessions, let us help you out further by providing some realistic examples below. Try to match the voice and tone put on display to keep your team members feeling confident and elevated, while making it clear where you expect them to improve for next time.
Providing Feedback: Failed Deadline
In this scenario, a member of a content creation team failed to meet a deadline, which caused delays in other areas of the project. Here’s one approach you could take:
“I’ve noticed that you submitted your last project a day past the set deadline. This had a big impact on others in the team and left our client feeling frustrated. I’d like to thank you for all the hard work you put into this, and it’d be great to work together to find out how we can prevent this from happening again next time”.
In this example of constructive criticism, the person giving the feedback makes it clear that submitting the task late has consequences. However, they take the time to thank the team member for the work they put into it, and they’re lightening the load by offering to help the team member manage their workload.
Providing Feedback: Peer Collaboration
In this situation, one team member is having trouble collaborating with their peers, leading to frequent miscommunications and harming the overall workflow. Consider taking this approach:
“It’s clear you’re having some challenges working together with the rest of the team. The quality of your work is great, but proper collaboration will take it to the next level. Let’s figure out how to get you more connected to other team members and improve your communication”.
This example pairs criticism with positive feedback. It also gives the team member a solution and a helping hand to improve going forward.
Providing Feedback: Professional Development
During this feedback session, the team manager decides it’s time to develop the skill set of one of their best team members:
“Your creativity and enthusiasm are great, and I see a lot of potential in you. To help you grow in your career, I want to invest in helping you develop your SEO skills. Let’s develop a plan to enable you to achieve this goal in the next six months”.
This example of positive feedback includes an action plan to help increase the skill set and productivity of the team members.
Your feedback session could revolve around praise, criticism, or a mix of both. Whatever the objective, make sure to deliver it in a way that offers to help the team member solve the issue at hand.
What Not to Do When Giving Your Content Team Feedback
You’ve learned the benefits of giving regular feedback, you’re equipped with some helpful strategies for delivering it, and you’ve obtained several realistic examples. Now, let’s bring this article to a close with what you shouldn’t do. Strive to avoid these critical errors, and you’ll have your content team on the right path in no time at all.
Be Vague
Vagueness is the enemy when it comes to delivering fruitful constructive criticism. Being indirect and unclear could lead to a team member failing to improve—or even moving backwards. Make an effort to tell them exactly what you want from them, and how you’re going to help them achieve it, during each session.
Forget to Follow Up
If you don’t follow up, there’s a good chance the same errors could rear their heads again in the future. Make sure to start each feedback session with a follow up, rewarding progress and offering to devise strategies for areas where team members are struggling.
Give Feedback in Front of Peers
Do not—we repeat, do not—give personal feedback in front of other team members. This could potentially humiliate a certain member of the team and erode their trust. Keep your feedback meetings confidential, where reasonable, to build rapport and confidence.
Learning exactly what to avoid will help your feedback sessions become much more effective. Don’t be vague, make sure to always follow up, and avoid giving feedback in front of others.
Regular Feedback: The Key to a Thriving Content Team
Sometimes it feels like developing your content team requires constant innovation, investment, and complex strategies. While true to an extent, simply scheduling frequent feedback sessions can help your team take massive strides forward in exchange for very little time and no cost. Don’t underestimate the power of sitting down with a team member, honestly laying out your perceptions of their work and your expectations, and agreeing on how to work together to bring the best out of them.
