How Peer Feedback Helps to Develop Your Team

Giving and receiving peer feedback is essential for any workplace that wants to thrive. Learn how to do it effectively in order to help your team grow.

Peer feedback is an essential part of the process to creating a workplace that thrives. The benefits of peer reviews are plentiful, and they're important for creating an unbiased evaluation of employees. By allowing your teammates to provide valuable input on each other's work, it encourages collaboration, provides greater clarity of expectations, and allows for more diverse experiences that could potentially lead to new ideas or creative approaches.

This article will explore the benefits of peer feedback in greater detail, discuss the various ways it can be implemented into teams of all sizes, and ultimately show why it is an invaluable tool when striving for success within a group dynamic.

Benefits of peer feedback

Can help to identify mistakes

Every now and then, there might be a single mistake made or a recurring mistake that an employee is making that isn't being corrected. Maybe it’s a mistake that impacts the team but that the manager hasn’t noticed or had time to address yet.

Peer feedback provides a space for these mistakes to be brought to the attention of employees with the end-goal to help them improve as well as help the team improve overall. This can be done in a non-judgemental way.

However, this is not to say that all peer reviews and peer feedback sessions must focus on the negatives. Peer feedback is just as important for highlighting positive aspects and skills and an individual's performance.

Creates a channel for open communication

The process of peer feedback is an excellent way to create a team that feels more comfortable to have open communication. Creating a space where peers offer feedback will encourage more honest and open working relationships between employees.

It can have great benefits by helping to create a more efficient and dynamic team who individually feel more confident to discuss important matters that might otherwise get sidelined if they didn't feel they can share important feedback. This culture of trust and openness is key in helping a team reach its full potential.

Problem solving skills

Peer feedback can help employees develop their problem-solving skills by helping them to see solutions to problems that they otherwise may not have thought of. Problem-solving skills are an essential part of the workplace, allowing for individuals to better come up with solutions as well as use their creativity to solve these issues. It encourages self-reflection and allows for creative, outside-the-box solutions to arise from learning from someone else who has seen the situation firsthand.

Peer feedback can help employees not just find potential solutions, but also provides a learning experience where they can develop their critical thinking skills, allowing them to better handle any future issues with their problem solving skill set.

Improves a team in the long-term

When people think of peer reviews, they often get a bit too caught up in the short-term. Knowing how to promote teamwork in the workplace is essential, and peer-to-peer feedback is an excellent way to do this. Whilst feedback from your peers can have very positive impacts on an employee's immediate performance, the long-term benefits of effective feedback should not be forgotten nor understated. Effective constructive criticism within peer feedback should also be focused around the long-term improvement of the individual and the team, too.

When team members are providing peer feedback, it's important that they are encouraged to consider the long-term as well. Prompt them to think about where they'd like to see their team improve and better perform within a year's time and what feedback they can provide to help it get there.

Helps managers to gain insights into their employees

Peer reviews are a constructive and positive tool that managers can use to gain deeper insight into their employees. The process of peer reviews enables employees to provide constructive feedback to each other on areas such as job performance, attitude and behaviour. This feedback is not only constructive but can often be the key to unlocking an employee’s true potential that the manager may have otherwise been unable to detect in one-on-one conversations.

Using regular peer review sessions allows managers to gain better insight into the strengths and limitations of their staff, equipping them with valuable knowledge that can help create more productive working relationships with their employees.

Can be used to create learning opportunities

Peer feedback is a powerful learning tool that can be leveraged to create learning programs and aid teams in developing the skills of employees. The insights that are gained from peer feedback can be invaluable and can be used for effective goal-setting for both themselves but also the from their managers.

The feedback from peers may show areas where employees are struggling or lacking in particular skills or knowledge which can highlight the need for specific learning programmes.

How to give effective employee feedback

Be specific

When giving feedback to your peers, it's important to try and be as specific as possible. This will help the employee to be able to more clearly understand the areas that they need to improve in.

Negative feedback can be positive

This might sound a bit contradictory, but it’s true that negative feedback can be just as effective as positive feedback if not more so in some instances. This often comes in the form of constructive criticism, and it's important to do this properly.

Constructive criticism can have some seriously positive outcomes on your workplace as a whole as it gently and constructively points or areas for improvement and intends to inspire and motivate rather than demean and demoralise.

Don't ignore the positives

Whilst constructive criticism can be very useful in helping coworkers to grow, providing peers with positive feedback can really help to boost confidence and recognise what they're doing well. Recognising their strengths can help to foster a positive feedback loop which helps to build a strong feedback culture.

A feedback sandwich is a good method of providing meaningful feedback by starting off with a positive comment, adding in some constructive feedback in the middle and then ending it off on a positive note. This can help to make it easier to receive and digest any negative feedback and helps to motivate the recipient of the feedback.

Focus on the fix

As good as it is to be able to provide peer feedback, it's important to also spend time to also think of a fix for your fellow employee. It's all good and well offering feedback on someone's performance, but there's going to be left feeling a little bit unfulfilled if you don't also offer your ideas on how exactly to improve it. Offering possible solutions will help to strengthen teams by encouraging a proactive can-do attitude towards problems.

Continuous feedback evaluations

These discussions can be highly valuable, so why only have them once a year? A great way to develop your team is to have continuous feedback sessions to help foster a healthy learning environment. It can also help employees get more used to the process of handing feedback over to their peers, creating a culture of peer-to-peer feedback in your organisation.

Peer feedback examples

Knowing how to give effective feedback to your peers and team members can be tricky if you've never done it before. Below are some peer feedback examples that include both positive feedback examples and constructive feedback examples that can be conducive to a more efficient workplace.

Learning new skills

When a co-worker has learnt a new skill or really refined one, it can be a great opportunity for your feedback to point out that this has been recognised and has helped this team. It can fill that co-worker with confidence, and also inspire them to take on new challenges to help better themselves further.

Acknowledgment of achieving a goal

Whether this is a goal that was set in a previous peer review or from a conversation with their manager, acknowledging that a team member managed to reach that goal can fill them with confidence and push them further to reach even higher goals. Let them know the impact that this had not just on them as an individual, but how it also had a positive knock-on effect to the entire team and express their gratitude for it.

Taking on new responsibilities

If you've noticed that a coworker has gone the extra mile in recent times and has taken on new responsibilities to help the team, let them know that this has been appreciated and noticed. It might have been a stressful couple of months for that employee, so letting them know in your feedback that their extra effort has helped will go a long way.

Micromanagement

Micromanagement can really hinder an employee's progression, holding them back from being able to explore their creativity and flourish as an individual. In this instance, it can be really effective to have a conversation gently letting them know that a different management style would help to get the best out of you.

Struggling with deadlines

Employees may struggle with meeting their deadlines at times, and peer reviews can be an excellent opportunity to recognise this and attempt to resolve the issue. Instead of punishing them, it's important to point out that this has been recognised and provide suggestions of how that employee could better be supported to help meet their deadlines.

Wrapping up

Providing regular peer feedback is a key part of developing your team. By taking the time to give effective feedback, you can help your team members to improve their skills and performance. If employees are not used to giving feedback to their peers, it will require a process of getting used to that. However, the benefits of this can be great, helping to create a positive feedback culture throughout the workplace.

Skillsarena can help to further develop your team with a range of skills tests to further understand the strengths and weaknesses of team members. Give better feedback with and a more detailed and structured insight into your team member’s skills today!

How Peer Feedback Helps to Develop Your Team