Posts Tagged ‘employee reviews’

By Rieva Lesonsky

Employee feedback is a hot buzzword these days—a plethora of studies show that workers, especially younger ones, crave constant input from the boss about how they’re doing. But are you providing the right kind of feedback? Recent academic research reported in Strategy+Business offers some thought-provoking insights into what really works to motivate employees—and what doesn’t.

Researchers sought to measure the effects of three kinds of feedback: Positive feedback, indirect negative feedback (i.e., comments that were vague and unclear as to what and how employees needed to improve) and direct negative feedback (comments that clearly explained the problem with employees’ performance).

The researchers tested all types of feedback on employees who performed rote data entry tasks. Employees were not told their exact rankings or that of their co-workers, but were told how they rated in relation to either the “bottom 10” or “top 10” in terms of productivity.

While overall, the study found that all types of feedback tend to result in improved performance when delivered on a regular basis, in the short term, different kinds of feedback got different—and surprising—results. Positive reviews didn’t have much effect on productivity. And vague negative reviews actually hurt performance, causing productivity to drop an average of 17 percent the next day.

But direct negative reviews made productivity surge. When workers first received direct negative feedback, their performance improved an average of 13.6 percent the next day. But when employees first received an indirect negative review, they faltered, dropping an in productivity the following day. The researchers concluded the people who were informed they were in the bottom 10 were motivated to improve by shame.

If you’re looking for quick results when giving an employee feedback, this study suggests it may be better to be brutally honest about poor performance—something that can be tough for many of us entrepreneurs to do.

However, in the long run, the researchers found that all forms of feedback helped boost performance. Compared with a control group that got no feedback, the positive group’s productivity rose approximately 20 percent and the negative group’s productivity rose by approximately 30 percent.

The bottom line, according to the researchers: “Managers should consistently tell their employees where they stand: Whether presented in positive or negative terms, feedback tends to improve performance over time.”

You can read the full study here.

Image by Flickr user Zaldylmg (Creative Commons)