Why Your Feedback is Making Things Worse

Are you, or your employees, working in a fog? For those whose managers don't give them constructive feedback, it can certainly feel that way.

When employees have clear goals, the role of feedback is pretty well understood. What's less clear is how feedback helps or hurts employees in a situation who are simply expected to do their best every day. After all, many employees don't have clear goals, but they're not expected to malinger, either. In these cases, it turns out that the wrong type of feedback can hurt employee productivity.

Francesco Gino, of Harvard Business School, and Bradley R. Staats, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did an experiment with data-entry workers at a Japanese bank to try to discover what sort of feedback would help make them more efficient. They grouped the workers into teams of 24, and gave them daily feedback about how well they were doing. The results were in some cases surprising:

• Giving frequent, daily feedback helps workers improve their performance. Overall, people who received daily feedback for a month about how efficient they were compared to their peers performed better than those who didn't get any feedback. That's the good news.
• Negative feedback has an immediate effect. People who got direct negative feedback did step it up the next day. So workers who were told that they were in the bottom 10 of their group of 24 did more work the next day. This is to be expected, since people are known to give more weight to negative comments than they do to positive ones.
• Vaguely negative feedback hurts performance. The workers who got indirect negative feedback--"I can't tell you how you're doing, but you're not in the bottom 10"-- did worse the next day. An example of indirect negative feedback is, "Well, I can't tell you exactly how well you're doing, but you're not in the bottom 10." While this sort of feedback is often meant to be reassuring, in this study, it actually hurt employee performance.
• Direct, positive feedback has no effect on performance, but it might be good for morale. So telling someone they are at the top of their group doesn't improve their performance. One could argue that in this situation, it's not the feedback that's ineffective-it's just that the person doesn't have that much room to improve.

Unlike most U.S. workers, these individuals had an implicit guarantee of lifetime employment, since the bank had never fired anyone in this group for doing a bad job. All new employees have to make it through a two-week probationary period, but everyone in the study had more than two weeks' tenure at the bank.

It's possible that, in a firm where people were punished for poor performance, feedback, or the lack thereof, might have a greater effect.

What makes for effective feedback in your experience?

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