Low Quality Feedback Harms Employee Retention Efforts

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Kieran Snyder, CEO of Textio, and Mallun Yen, CEO of the Operator Collective, have published some fascinating results of a study they conducted regarding employee feedback. You can read about their findings in this article they have written for Fortune, and you can examine their complete report here.  Synder and Yen describe how they studied feedback at one large organization in depth:

To explore this, we looked at the performance reviews of a large, international enterprise organization across a variety of roles. The data set contains performance reviews for more than 13,000 employees across two annual review cycles. Because we have two years of data, we can see whether an employee in the Year 1 data set is also included in the Year 2 data set. In other words, for each employee, we can see the quality of their written performance feedback, as well as their retention or attrition outcome the following year.

People who received low-quality feedback were more likely to leave the organization than people who received more actionable feedback. What’s more, this impact is causal, not just correlational: Our analysis controlled for potentially confounding factors such as numerical performance rating and employee tenure. People who received low-quality feedback were 63% more likely to leave their organizations than everyone else. This held true whether they were high, middling, or low performers.

Snyder and Yen go on to make a crucial point about some managers' unwillingness to provide direct feedback.  Trying to avoid a confrontation can be problematic. Some managers try to "soften" their feedback in ways that are detrimental to long-term employee retention.  They write: 

Shying away from giving direct feedback also causes employees to quit. Even when feedback is provided, it may be provided in conflict-avoidant and indirect ways. The practice of hedging, where the feedback provider couches their intended feedback in less direct language, is common... “I think” was by far the most common phrase used in hedging feedback. By introducing feedback with an “I think” statement, the manager is communicating that their point of view might just be a matter of opinion and that they might not be fully committed to it. This is problematic even in positive feedback, as the manager inadvertently communicates doubt about the praise they’re giving. For example, by saying “I think you did a good job on that presentation” rather than just stating that the report did a good job.

It matters. People who get performance reviews containing “I think” hedging statements were 29% more likely to leave the company within a year than everyone else.

So much attention has been placed on whether to eliminate annual performance reviews, or to alter various employee ranking systems. In some ways, we might be missing the most important point about developing our people - namely, the quality of the feedback (and the language we use in offering that feedback) matters a great deal regardless of the timing or the format in which we provide that feedback.  We have to overcome the tendency for conflict avoidance and train our managers to provide actionable, constructive feedback even when those conversations might be difficult.  

Delivering Negative Feedback

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In a recent article for Kellogg Insight, Professor Brooke Vuckovic offered some great tips on how to deliver negative feedback effectively.   Among the bits of advice, Vuckovic recommended trying to anticipate the types of new information that might emerge and challenge one's beliefs about the drivers of poor performance: "To prepare for this possibility, she suggests asking yourself a few prompts: What’s your story of the problem—and what story might this other person tell about the same problem?"  She advocates preparing for the possibility that you might not have a complete and accurate understanding of the situation.  You might ask yourself:  Under what circumstances might I change my mind about this employee's status?  Finally, Vuckovic argues that you also have to consider whether you did not articulate goals and expectations clearly.  What role did you perhaps play by not communicating clearly?

In the end, the employee may not be performing well, and you must deliver some feedback that might be difficult to hear.  Still, Vuckovic argues that you want to make sure to solicit the employee's perspective, listen actively, and play back what you have heard to insure you have understood clearly.   Finally, and most importantly, prepare an exit strategy for the conversation.  If things aren't going well, have a plan for how to bring the conversation to a close, perhaps with an invitation for further discussion once cooler heads have prevailed.  

Giving Feedback: Stay on Your Side of the Net

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Adam Bryant, managing director of Merryck & Co, has a terrific article for the New York Times (for which he used to write regularly), about how to build a successful team. He based this essay on over 500 interviews he conducted with senior executives over many years while writing the Corner Office column for the newspaper.   One piece of advice that Bryant offers is to "stay on your side of the net" when giving a team member constructive feedback on his or her performance.  Here's an excerpt:

A big part of holding people accountable for their work is a willingness to have frank discussions about problems and misunderstandings that inevitably arise among colleagues. But the fact is that most managers go out of their way to avoid these “adult conversations.” It’s understandable. They can be unpleasant, and most people would rather deliver good news instead of bad. Also, you never quite know how somebody’s going to react to feedback. That is why problems are often swept under the rug, and maybe dealt with months later in an annual performance review.

One of the smartest tips for having such conversations is to make sure you “don’t go over the net.”  It means you should never make statements that include assumptions about the motivations behind someone’s behavior. Instead, you should stay on your side of the net and talk only about what you’re observing and your own reactions and feelings. That way, it’s harder for people to get their back up because you’re not devising rationales to explain someone else’s behavior. 

Consider, for example, the small but important difference in approaches in the following paragraph: "I’ve noticed you keep showing up 20 minutes late, and it seems like you don’t care." The boss has gone over the net here and accused the person of not caring. "I’ve noticed you keep showing up 20 minutes late, and it makes me feel like you don’t care." Here, with just a small language tweak, the boss is staying on the right side of the net, and avoided an overheated conversation because the employee can’t argue about how someone feels.

This approach was first described to me by Andrew Thompson, the chief executive of Proteus Digital Health, who said he uses it as a counterweight to a natural tendency of human beings. “People concoct all this imaginary garbage about why the person is doing this to them when in fact the person may not even realize that they’re doing anything,” Mr. Thompson said.