Re-Imagining Performance Feedback

As the performance year draws to an end, many are dreading the upcoming practice of performance feedback. Managers struggle to deliver it. Employees don’t know what to do with it.

Time to rethink performance feedback?

The below are a list of common employee and manager pain points around performance feedback that I compiled from my own client work. Scholarly research supports these opportunity areas. I also added a few examples of how some companies are addressing these challenges to spark some initial inspiration for how we might design a more human-centric performance feedback process.

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Variance in providing ongoing feedback throughout the year results in inequity.

Performance feedback should be given in the moment, not just twice a year. Research supports that delays in feedback hurt performance and learning, especially around course-correction. When feedback is given closer to the moment it happened, the more likely it will positively change behavior.

Conversely, if continuous feedback is not the norm inside an organization, then some managers will provide more feedback and others only “as required” twice a year. This results in what I call feedback inequity, with some employees given ongoing opportunities to improve and others being surprised by their manager’s feedback at the end of the year.

Here is how a couple of companies address this pain point:

• Managers at GE hold frequent “touchpoint” meetings with direct reports to discuss two basic questions: “What am I doing that I should keep doing? And what am I doing that I should change?” They also have an app that allows managers and employees to make text or audio notes, attach documents and upload handwritten notes which they can later discuss in their next check-in.
• ?Adobe cut voluntary employee turnover by 30% a year after introducing a frequent check-in program.

Constructive feedback and development opportunities are not continuously provided to women of color.

Studies repeatedly show that stereotypes of all kinds (gender, ethnicity, age, disability etc.) are filters through which we evaluate others, often in ways that advantage dominant and disadvantage historically marginalized groups of people.

“When leaders withhold critical feedback that can help improve one’s performance, especially a marginalized person, the person in question then continues to underperform because they are not given any helpful criticism,” says Dr. Courtney McCluney .

Here is how a couple of companies address this pain point:

• ?Wayfair monitors biased language in reviews for certain employee populations and employees can request a third-party review of their overall performance review.
• A mid-sized U.S. law firm realized the following impact after one year of implementing two “bias interrupters”: 1) an updated review form that asked for ratings to be backed by three pieces of evidence 2) a one-hour workshop that taught everyone how to use the form.

There is a desire to more formally incorporate feedback from other stakeholders.

I have to admit, this one caught me by surprise. I don’t like 360s. Mainly, because I have seen it do more harm than good due to lack of organizational and individual maturity in giving and receiving feedback. And I have heard the same concern from other HR leaders…

Maybe it’s time to challenge our own biases on this?

I was curious and launched a LinkedIn poll a few months ago asking the community for what they think might be the real need behind the desire for formalized, multi-source feedback as part of the performance process. Most respondents thought it was due to a lack of psychological safety or a low maturity feedback culture.

In their research, Atwater, Brett, and Cherise-Charles (2007) discuss aspects of successful multi-source feedback systems which include ensuring trust, providing support, being sensitive to individual differences, and trying to boost self-efficacy.

Here is how a couple of companies address this pain point:

• ?IBM and Amazon use an app that enables employees to give feedback to peers and choose whether the recipient’s boss gets a copy.
• Zalando designed a performance dashboard where employees can see, in one place, all the quantitative and qualitative feedback they have received for both development and evaluation. The tool also shows individuals how their feedback compares with that of the average scores on their teams and of people who hold similar jobs.

I am curious: What are other employee pain points around performance feedback? How have you tried to address them?

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Being asked to continually provide feedback on performance goals feels forced.

This insight seems to shed light on the feedback expectation gap between employees and managers. Managers might feel the onus for updating goals and ensuring they receive feedback should be on the employees. There also is the sense that over-structuring this process would feel inorganic.

I wonder if this is the real pain point or if it masks deeper insecurities around providing feedback.

Gallup research has discovered that managers generally don't know what to say -- only 14.5% of managers strongly agree that they are effective at giving feedback.

Research finds that managers were motivated to improve to the extent they perceived the feedback conversation to be focused on future actions rather than on past performance.

And Google found that their highest performing teams are built on a foundation of psychological safety.

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Leaders struggle with difficult review conversations.

Difficult performance feedback conversations range from an employee feeling as though they deserve a higher rating than the manager does to not knowing how to communicate how an employee’s rating changed due to calibration.

I believe this merits more investigation inside your own organization: What are all the feedback scenarios that managers struggle with? Then determine, are they due to discomfort with having difficult conversations or is what you are asking managers to communicate hard because the underlying performance management process is not human-centered and needs to be re-imagined?

A study among healthcare organizations showed that enabling difficult conversations is better than avoiding them. The Australian Government published a managers guide to difficult conversations in the workplace.?

I am curious: What are other manager pain points around performance feedback? How have you tried to address them?

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Last but not least, I wanted to share this lovely Pinterest board that Pinterest’s L&D team curated to share resources on how to give/receive feedback and the science behind it all.

I hope these insights spark inspiration for you to re-imagine your own performance feedback approach towards a more human-centric practice.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Design Thinking for HR is a biweekly LinkedIn newsletter that aims to inspire HR professionals to experiment with the human-centered design framework. The newsletter is curated by?Nicole Dessain who is the Chief Employee Experience Designer at talent.imperative , Founder of the HR.Hackathon Alliance , and a Northwestern University instructor. Nicole is currently writing her first book about Design Thinking for HR. Join the Early Readers’ Community here .