Feedback

How do you give feedback at work without offending someone?

It can be quite difficult, especially if it's something negative that needs improving.

As long as you make it clear that what you're doing is in that person's interest, and to make the thing better, then it's OK. It can still be tricky, but it's OK.

You've got to still talk about the positives and kind of work collaboratively on helping each other to make this thing better.

In today's episode of Office English, we're talking about giving and receiving feedback at work.

Hello and welcome to Office English, your podcast guide to the world of work. I’m Pippa.

And I'm Phil. Don't forget to visit our website to read along with this podcast and find all the language we discuss.

We heard from our BBC Learning English colleagues at the start of the programme about their experience giving feedback to people at work. What's feedback Phil?

It's when you comment on someone's work and it could be positive feedback to say that it's really good, or it could be negative feedback to say that it's not good enough.

Yeah, it can be quite difficult to give feedback to your colleagues at work, especially if you're not used to doing it. And it can also be tricky if you're the one getting the feedback too.

Yeah, I mean, we all want to do well at work. And it can be hard if you think that your work is good, but others don't agree with you.

Yeah. And sometimes feedback can be quite confusing. If something isn't clear, you've had a comment and you're actually not sure what it means. That can be quite difficult at work as well, I think.

Yeah, I sometimes think feedback can sometimes be a bit emotional, can't it? And not, not that constructive. It doesn't tell you what you actually need to do. It's just someone's reaction to it.

Yeah. Constructive feedback is something you hear a lot at work, and that means that the feedback needs to tell you something useful about the work you've done. So something that you can improve, something you can change, or something that was really good and you should do again, it has to be constructive.

So today we'll talk about how to give feedback that can be easily understood, and how to make sure your feedback doesn't offend anyone.

Let's start with a scenario. So, Phil, imagine that your boss has asked you to review a report written by a colleague, and you've been asked to give them feedback. You've noticed that there are some errors and you don't think the work is good enough. What do you say?

I think it's often important to try to phrase your criticism from your perspective as a reader. So you might say, 'I was a bit confused' by something if it's a little bit hard to understand. You could also say, 'I'm not sure if I follow your reasoning here' and follow means understand and reasoning is like the way you explain your arguments and why you think they're correct.

Yeah. So having that perspective of a reader I think is quite helpful because in British workplaces certainly we don't like to be too confrontational. So if you're giving feedback and you're saying, 'I didn't understand this' rather than saying 'This is confusing', I think that just makes it a little bit more polite for somebody who's reading the feedback. As we said at the start of the programme, you need to be constructive. So this means giving solutions and not just problems. So I might say something like, 'If it were me, I'd spend more time on…' and then give them a tip of what I would change, rather than just saying this is wrong or this doesn't make sense. Or I could say something like, 'Why not try…?' and then give a suggestion so you're being constructive. You're offering them options of what they could change.

The best kinds of feedback is feedback that helps you to improve. So it recognises the things that were good, but also it's very specific about what you can do to make something better, and what you can do to do it better next time. You can use things like tracked changes often in a document that will show little typos and errors, but then sometimes you can add a comment to explain if something you think is wrong or is not the right way to do something. But also you can explain why sometimes, depending on the situation and the relationship you have with the person you're giving feedback to.

Yeah. I really like when I get feedback via tracked changes and comments in a document, because then I know exactly what someone's talking about. Sometimes if you just have a conversation about a piece of work, you might not understand exactly what you've been asked to change.

Because there could be different kinds of feedback, can't there? There could be things where something is just wrong or it's not going to work, but there can also be actually, here's a different way of doing it and just giving an opinion about it, which maybe you decide to take on or decide not to take on. Let's talk about another situation. This time you're in a meeting and some colleagues are presenting an idea that they've been working on. You have some suggestions. What can we do to make them politely, Pippa?

Well, this is tricky because unlike our first scenario, where we've been asked to give the feedback, we might not have been asked to give this feedback. And sometimes people don't like receiving feedback if they haven't asked for it. So I would usually start by saying something positive so I could say something like, 'It all sounds really exciting'. And that's kind of showing that I'm interested in their idea. And then you can introduce a question to their idea. So you could say, 'It all sounds really exciting, but I wasn't sure about this part'. And so you've been positive at the start, but you're also showing that you have some doubts.

Yeah. And as we said before, it's actually it's good to try and make a suggestion rather than just criticising. So you can say, 'Could I suggest...?' And that's a nice introduction. And then you can say what you think they could change afterwards.

Yeah. And you should think about the culture in your workplace. So in some workplaces it might not be OK to offer your opinion in a meeting like this. It might be a more hierarchical situation where you're just expected to listen rather than give your opinion. So think about that when you're doing it. And also I think, think about whether the meeting is the right time to do it, because we can sometimes get a bit carried away in meetings and get really kind of passionate about an idea. But maybe it might be easier to talk to someone after the meeting and say, ‘I had some ideas about what you were discussing’. So think about that.

Yeah. Sometimes it's easier to talk about things like this with someone one to one, when there isn't an audience. Some people might not want it being brought up in front of others.

OK. We've talked lots about giving feedback to other people. But what if you're the one receiving the feedback? You mentioned earlier, Phil, that people might add comments to some work that you've done that you don't necessarily agree with, or maybe you don't understand them. So what do you do if you don't agree with some feedback that you've been given?

I think one of the most important things we feedback, but sometimes the hardest things to do is to try and keep emotion out of it. So don't get into an argument. Also, I mean feedback, it should be clear, but it isn't always. So try to make sure that you understand exactly what the feedback is, so try and clarify it. You might say 'When you say… whatever… Do you mean that I should…?' So just try to make sure that you understand the feedback first before you start addressing it.

Yes, and in some situations you can gently challenge feedback. So maybe you could explain more about your work, or explain what you were thinking when you wrote something or did something a certain way. So if I received some feedback that I wasn't necessarily sure about, or I maybe wanted to explain why I'd done it a certain way, I could say, 'I think my reasoning for doing it this way is…' and then give them a reason. So you're just gently saying, 'I actually don't agree with the comment you've made', or just kind of trying to explain yourself a bit more.

And also something else that can happen is someone might suggest something that actually you've already tried it and it didn't work. And then you probably want to explain that. You might say, 'I did think about doing this, but I was worried it would impact this', or 'I did try this, but then this happened'. You're explaining why you can't do a particular thing, or why you think it might be a bad idea.

Yeah. And remember, if you do end up having this more collaborative discussion about your feedback and your work, make sure that at the end of it, it's clear what you need to change and what can stay the same. Because if you've gone backwards and forwards with someone and you've sort of debated, should we change this? Should we change this? Sometimes at the end of that conversation, you're not really sure whether the feedback is still valid or not. And so I usually would try and sum up and say, 'So moving forwards, I'm going to change…' And then I would just list what I've decided off the back of that conversation. And then they might be like, 'No, we're also going to, you know, move this paragraph here or whatever'.

That's it for this episode of Office English. We'd love to hear about your experiences at work. What do you find difficult to talk about in English? What confuses you? Email us at learningenglish@bbc.co.uk.

Next time we'll talk about asking for and offering to help at work. See you then, bye.

Bye.