Providing your employees with feedback is a crucial part of being a manager. Without it, people are working in a vacuum, never knowing whether they’re doing good or not. This either leads to people that are overconfident when they shouldn’t be, or people performing well who think they are doing poorly.

I know many managers that never provide regular feedback. They think it’s not that important, or they’re just too busy. Yet, there always comes the time that you want to take someone for a chat because something has finally reached your threshold and you must help resolve an issue.

But, when this is your first piece of feedback in months (or years), there’s no way of conveying it without seeming to make a big deal out of it. When people get reports only once in a while, they tend to feel blind sighted, jumped on, and not take the feedback as a healthy and regular part of the relationship.

And this sort of non functioning system usually end up with the managers, aware of this issue, decide to provide even less feedback in order to avoid issues. And I’ve seen several times how this essentially boils down to needless employee turnover as someone that could’ve done better never gets the needed guidance, wasting everyone’s time and efforts.

You, and all managers in your organization, should be having regular one-on-ones with their direct reports. I hate hearing “but we’ve got nothing to talk about.” Schedule those 30 minutes, usually finish in 10. No one gets angry over a meeting being over early. But do have that chat regularly. Having that space and mindset that welcomes growth means you can always provide necessary feedback.

And, of course, once these happen regularly they tend to establish a healthier relationship and encourage more introspection and personal growth, when done properly. Schedule these in a repeating meeting, and never cancel them. It’s as easy as that.