Praising and recognizing good performance is easy, but when it comes to the situation when someone on your team needs a kick in the pants than a pat on the shoulder, you need to give negative feedback.

Giving negative feedback without demoralizing and demotivating the other person is one of the most challenging tasks for many project managers. However, it is important to give teammates, colleagues and employees the necessary feedback in order to improve their quality of work and career development.

Keep in mind that the goal of negative feedback is not to tell your team members what to do or how to do it. The actual goal is to improve the quality of work, behavior of the team member, increase efficiency to bring out the best in your entire company.

Creating an environment, where people feel comfortable giving constructive feedback to each other, is essential to your business success. Many think that negative feedback doesn’t work and can’t help people to improve their performance and the criticism can only be done in private.

However, specific negative feedback can lead to optimum performance, increase efficiency, and by holding people publicly responsible, they’ll be more likely to take the feedback seriously.

There are a number of things you can do to make the process of giving constructive criticism simpler and easier. Let’s check out the infographic below and learn some smart ways to giving negative feedback to your employees.