Reimagine Feedback to Drive Engagement and Growth

Eighty-seven percent of engaged employees have an exceptionally positive view of their organization’s culture, according to the SHRM report The State of Global Workplace Culture in 2024. As a catalyst for driving employee engagement and organizational growth, performance feedback offers tremendous potential. A workplace culture of meaningful feedback supports agility, improves work performance, and retains talent, according to Gallup.

Companies that prioritize employee performance also experience 30% higher revenue growth and are 4.2 times more likely to outperform their competitors compared with those that do not prioritize this metric, McKinsey & Company notes.

However, when leaders and managers avoid delivering feedback, the opposite of engagement and growth can occur. Reimagining feedback through blending traditional and modern approaches, leveraging technology, and training management in how to deliver feedback that is well received can lead organizations on the path to break free from ineffective performance feedback practices.

Limits of Traditional Feedback

Traditional feedback methods typically rely on outdated structures such as annual performance reviews, which are based on goals and measures set at the beginning of the yearly review cycle. 

“We still see a lot of once-a-year reviews,” said Rob Wilson, president of Employco USA, an HR consulting firm based in Westmont, Ill., that works with HR departments containing from two to 3,500 employees. “No one likes them.”

The drawbacks of this legacy model are well documented. First, it is not designed to address real-time performance issues. “You can’t run a business on a data point you receive annually; it’s the wrong tool for the job,” noted Ansel Duff, founder and CEO of Fordi, an AI-powered software platform, in the SHRM Labs segment Operationalizing Feedback.

Second, traditional feedback has a retrospective focus that tends toward fixing weaknesses. “They look for areas where a person isn’t meeting the standard and work to close that gap,” said Chris Dotson, founder, CEO, and leadership coach at Holistic Leadership Solutions, based in Ypsilanti, Mich. Research in psychology has demonstrated the flaws in this approach, which leads to avoiding mistakes instead of pursuing success.

Third, the traditional feedback structure doesn’t meet the needs of today’s more diverse and intergenerational workforce that responds to frequent and culturally competent feedback. Generation Y and Generation Z are projected to make up 66% of the U.S. workforce by 2030, and they demand instant everything, noted Duff.

“Most organizations want managers to provide employees with regular, timely feedback, rather than only once or twice a year,” said Shari Harley, founder and president of Candid Culture Inc., an international training and keynote speaking firm headquartered in Denver. Employees also want more regular, timely feedback.

“The problem is that managers and leaders don’t often have the training or the relationships with employees to give feedback that will be well received, so they avoid giving feedback,” Harley said. “Trust hasn’t been sufficiently built.”

Modern Methodologies

A strengths-based coaching approach is the modern alternative to focusing on employee weaknesses. Dotson, a Gallup-certified strengths coach, looks for areas of success that already exist and finds ways to replicate them. “By strengths, we are not solely considering what they are good at, but more importantly, work exemplified by the four Es—ease, energy, excitement, and enjoyment,” he said. “We find that these areas set the stage for engaging work.”

Weekly 15- to 30-minute meaningful conversations that focus on 1) appreciation for recent work, 2) collaboration and relationships, and 3) current goals and priorities, are another facet of the strengths-based approach. Eighty percent of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback within the past week are fully engaged, according to Gallup.

The 360-degree feedback model gathers input from all directions—peers, subordinates, and supervisors—to give a bigger picture of an employee’s performance and to encourage and uncover hidden strengths.

Famed leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith pioneered the term “feedforward” to encourage managers to frame their comments with “next time” forward-looking solutions, instead of placing blame on past missteps, to encourage a growth mindset.

Blending traditional and modern feedback approaches is another way to phase in more frequent and meaningful feedback. Wilson recommends that organizations prioritize informal quarterly check-ins over the annual review and use a method of feedback delivery that the employee prefers, such as Zoom. Conducting a second exit interview 60-90 days after an employee has left can yield surprising and useful results.

Leveraging Technology

New platforms have emerged in recent years that are designed to make it easy to give instant and ongoing feedback that becomes a part of office culture. Popular choices include 15Five, Lattice, and Culture Amp. However, managing and protecting employee data and ensuring that performance data is probed for fairness and unconscious bias all need to be taken into account. Episode 16 of the SHRM Workplace Tech Spotlight series explored how leveraging technology to obtain organic feedback can enhance employee retention.

At SHRM, Culture Amp allows employees to share their feedback in meaningful ways, whether it’s through onboarding surveys, engagement assessments, or pulse checks. Managers use Culture Amp insights to enhance one-on-one meetings and provide tailored feedback, creating stronger connections with their teams and driving individual and organizational growth.

“This data not only helps us understand their experiences but also fosters an environment where every voice is heard and valued,” said Jay Jones, SHRM-CP, lead for talent and employee experience at SHRM. “By leveraging Culture Amp’s robust analytics, we’ve been able to spot trends, celebrate successes, and address challenges with transparency. This strengthens trust across the organization and helps us design initiatives that truly enhance the employee experience.”

Anonymous feedback portals such as Suggestion Ox and Workleap Officevibe, the latter of which has an integration with Microsoft Teams, can help create an open communication culture without fear of judgment. Wilson uses anonymous surveys that are limited to 30 questions, which he believes allows employees to be more truthful. The results create the basis for focus groups. The SHRM toolkit Managing Employee Surveys offers guidance for designing, deploying, and analyzing surveys.

Using AI for feedback is an emerging trend. Artificial intelligence tools can analyze performance data and provide tailored suggestions through algorithms that review key performance indicators (KPIs), engagement surveys, and communication patterns to generate actionable insights. However, it is critical to put measures in place to prevent algorithmic bias.

“It is important to remember that tech doesn’t have a voice, and it cannot take the place of in-person conversations where the employee knows they are being listened to,” Wilson said.

Transition Strategies

The first step to transition away from ineffective feedback systems is often to recognize what isn’t working. Signs that your organization may be in a “feedback rut” include flat or declining engagement scores, low goal achievement, persistent performance issues, employee resistance to feedback, and turnover that lags behind industry standards.

Cultural language is another indicator of broken feedback loops. Phrases such as “that’s not my job” and “they should know” speak to a lack of trust and employees that are not comfortable having conversations with colleagues, which is negatively impacting the work.

Creating a psychologically safe space for employees and managers to share what is and isn’t working about the current feedback process is critical. For focus groups, the SHRM guides How to Conduct an Employee Focus Group and How to Develop Questions for an Employee Focus Group offer helpful suggestions.

Organizations can also test out ideas by piloting a new approach. A pilot email campaign by McKinsey & Co. called “Receive to Grow,” which challenged participants to practice a core feedback-receiving skill each week, generated 250 feedback conversations and had an 88% participation rate.

Having the right tools matters. “When HR is chasing leaders and managers down to complete performance appraisal forms, they are using the wrong forms,” said Harley. People are more likely to complete templates that are easy to use and result in better performance. “Every performance management tool can and should be easy to learn and use,” she added.

“With every organization I work with, there is an overwhelming feeling that things are on fire, and they are so busy that it is hard to slow down and focus on development and feedback,” Dotson said. “But in the long run, it is a huge productivity saver, and HR needs to help leaders focus on the long term.”

Moving away from entrenched habits to innovative processes requires a clear plan for change management. “Start with the end result of what you want to achieve,” suggested Wilson. “It’s not going to happen overnight and will likely take at least a year.”

Feedback Skill-Building Tips and Tools

Leadership training plays an enormous role in helping managers learn how to deliver feedback effectively. “Training supervisors in effective communication is a large part of what we do,” said Wilson. Organizations can also tie promotional criteria to competencies such as caring about direct reports and listening to others.

“Giving timely, useful feedback is a learned skill. People aren’t born knowing how to give effective feedback,” said Harley. “However, it is a skill anyone can learn.”

Harley advises keeping feedback conversations short and objective—10 minutes once a week or twice a month. It should only take about two minutes to deliver feedback with one to three specific examples.

Harley’s two main training tools are the Feedback Formula and the Candor Questions. The formula is designed for anyone to be able to use, and it consists of eight simple steps to follow when giving feedback. It requires both people to provide input and work together to build an agreement on next steps.

The Candor Questions provide a starting point for building relationships based on trust. Examples include:

·      What skills do you have that the organization is not currently using?

·      What three things do you need in a job to be satisfied?

·      What is something you want to do that you have not had a chance to do?

·      What are three things that will keep you with this organization? What’s one thing that would make you leave?

5 Ways to Start Creating a Culture of Feedback

Use the following suggestions from Dotson as a starting point to envision what a culture of feedback would look like at your organization.

1. Link continuous feedback to organizational core values. Weave it into the fabric of the organization and be purposeful about doing it at every stage of the employee life cycle. Think, “This is who we are.”
2. Build interview questions into the recruitment process for management positions that ask for examples about how the candidate has given positive and corrective feedback.
3. During performance reviews, ask employees when they received feedback and start measuring the frequency of when people are asking for and giving feedback.
4. Rather than considering feedback as a separate HR process, make it part of daily workflows and an integral part of ongoing operations and conversations.
5. Measure the success and impact of feedback initiatives over time through KPIs such as the rate of turnover and internal promotions versus external hires.

Lastly, be sure to celebrate the positive outcomes of feedback programs born from employee insights.