Why nobody wants feedback

There’s one good time to give work-related feedback, and it’s not during the year-end performance review
businessinsider.in

The performance review season is upon us. But most of us hate it, even though we haven’t yet come up with a better alternative. It tends to put a lot of pressure on people rather than improving how they really work.

Everyone believes feedback is important and useful, but past research indicates that’s not quite true. An essential crisis inherent to the performance review is that they don’t work, according to Kevin Murphy, chair of work and employment studies at the University of Limerick and co-author of Performance Appraisal and Management.


“About a third of the time, feedback makes things better, about a third of the time feedback makes things worse, and about a third of the time it has no effect whatsoever,” says Murphy.

Negative feedback

Interestingly, a recent working paper, from researchers at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, also found that negative feedback is basically ineffective. The study co-author Paul Green told Harvard Business Review, “There’s an assumption that what motivates people to improve is the realisation that they’re not as good as they think they are. But, in fact, it just makes them find people who will not shine that light on them.”

That is to say, if your colleague says your work is sloppy, you might find another co-worker to tell you it’s impeccable.

Yet the recent trend in human resource departments across industries appears to be increasing the amount of feedback employees receive. IBM, for example, ditched the annual performance review and replaced it with a real-time feedback app that supposedly encourages casual dialogue between co-workers.

The value of employees

So, does feedback ever work? Murphy says feedback is constructive only right after an employee has been hired before they really understand their job duties. Once an employee understands his or her job duties, feedback has little or no effect on their overall job.

Researchers propose ‘designing work or learning environments that encourage trial and error’ so that employees can learn the hard way without their manager’s interference. To be sure, these environments sound like they’d take time and effort to create — but the potential improvement in employee performance might be worth it.

Green told the Harvard Business Review that it can be helpful to affirm people’s overall importance to the organisation — that is, letting them know their job isn’t necessarily in jeopardy — while delivering negative feedback. “It’s about accompanying negative feedback with validation of who people are and of their value to the organisation,” Green says. “And it’s not even about providing it all the time. People just need to feel valued,” he says.