Positive Feedback Examples

Positive feedback is essential for infusing serotonin, the “you did it” neurochemical, which stimulates feelings of happiness and fulfillment in the workplace.

Positive feedback also acts as an incentive to keep engaging and giving 100% effort (all of this is covered more in our crash course).

And, while we’re talking about incentives, here at Inspiring Accountability, we want to reward effort more than the achieved result. Why? Because sometimes the result is out of their hands. Sometimes they give 100% effort and still don’t get it. Or sometimes it’s luck. Being rewarded for luck is meaningless because it isn’t incentivizing something within our employees’ control.

What is always in their control? Their effort. And when employees give 100% effort consistently, this provides the best bet of successfully achieving the desired result. So we want to reward and give them positive feedback on their effort– how they specifically contributed to the achieved result.

When you reward effort, you incentivize effort. If you do nothing else, acknowledge what you want to incentivize.

The most rewarding and incentivizing positive feedback formula is simple: Gratitude for a specific effort + to whom or what it makes a positive difference.

With all this in mind, here are some positive feedback examples you can use to acknowledge your employee

Here are some positive feedback examples:

Simple successes:

“You did a great job on this Excel report. I can see you paid careful attention to the format requirements, and it’s formatted perfectly! Accounting will be able to use it to run the numbers right away!” (incentivizing careful effort to the format)

“Thank you for your help with the Pantheon Project. The client was thrilled, and we couldn’t have met our deadline without your valuable editing eyes! On behalf of the team, thank you!” (incentivizing helping, editing skills)

“I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate how you showed up in that meeting. I know you’ve been working on not interrupting, and your effort really showed. It was great to see your commitment to supporting our team morale. Thank you!” (incentivizing effort toward not interrupting)

You can give feedback for something you want them to do that they haven’t done yet (in this case, flexibility in changing their work):

“You did excellent work on creating those ads. It turns out the client didn’t like them, but I did! And I know you got out-of-the-box creative, and that is really valuable to this team and me. We will have to make some edits, but I want to let you know that I appreciate your creativity and flexibility in making some adjustments.” (Incentivizing getting more “out-of-the-box” creative and flexibility in making edits)

Things don’t have to be perfect to provide positive feedback:

“I know this was a tough time-frame. Although we did miss the deadline, I noticed your full effort and commitment to do everything possible to get through product testing. I know you don’t like being rushed when quality is on the line, and I know you did your best to move as efficiently as possible while ensuring you met our quality specs. I appreciate your effort and commitment.” (Incentivizing full effort and commitment)

But don’t fake it

It should be noted that fake gratitude is useless. Human brains are excellent lie detectors when it comes to intent (sometimes consciously, sometimes more subconsciously). Do what feels genuine to you so it authentically lands. Know that the above is most effective and incentivizing, but that won’t mean anything if it doesn’t resonate with you genuinely. If that’s the case, offer what you can and perhaps reflect on what’s in the way of being more comfortable sharing this format of praise.

I hope these positive feedback examples help you create your own style of effective recognition to help reward and incentivize your employees to keep doing great work!

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