Giving and receiving feedback in the workplace requires honesty, transparency, and commitment. If the feedback loop is broken, or geared toward either the manager or the employee, then the whole process becomes a formality, instead of a tool for progress and innovation.

By learning more about our reaction to negative comments, how to give and receive constructive feedback, and feedback’s role in the modern workplace, companies can utilize feedback to improve their work culture.

Why Do We Avoid Giving & Receiving Feedback?

Feedback is often associated with delivering negative comments. According to research, negative events tend to stick more in our heads than positive ones. Why? It is due to our preoccupation with survival when we were not on top of the food chain:

From our perspective, it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We believe that throughout our evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased probability of passing along their genes.

Bad Is Stronger Than Good, Baumeister et. al, 2001

In other words, negative input heightened our survival instincts and saved us from predators. But things are different today — employees and managers who are “better attuned to bad things” just quit (or become masochists).

The good news is that feedback doesn’t have to be cringe-worthy or threatening. In fact, experts suggest that we think of feedback as a gift. Not the kind of gift you buy on your way to someone’s birthday party, but a thoughtful gift that  promotes growth on both sides of the exchange.

What Is (and Isn’t) Feedback 

Not all gifts come in neat packages. In fact, some “feedback” is just an attempt to vent or play politics. Make sure you know what you are dealing with before you give or receive feedback.

The crucial step–the one that should precede all the others–can be simply stated:  Before starting to criticize someone, ask yourself the following question:  “Why am I doing this?”  If your answer is “To help this person improve,” proceed.  If it is anything else, such as “To even the score,” “To make him/her look bad in front of others,” or simply “Because I’m in a rotten mood,” stop right there.  These are not rational reasons for criticizing another person. 

Then prepare.  If you are going to deliver negative feedback, be sure you have concrete examples at your fingertips.  You must be able to cite “chapter and verse.”  Be sure to have all the facts.

Effective Criticism Made Easy, Robert Baron

Here are some tips that will help managers and employees reap the benefits of feedback in the workplace:

Managers:

• Be proactive. Keep in mind – feedback is a loop. Have open lines of communication with your employees and encourage a culture based on improvement and growth. Provide clear goals to your employees — this will empower employees by making them more self-efficient.

• Be wary of the “sandwich approach” (delivering negative feedback between two pieces of positive feedback). The common assumption is that it’s easier to hear negative comments (the meat) when they are delivered between two positive feedback buns. However, as it was noted earlier, employees tend to concentrate on the negative part of the feedback.

However, there are cases in which the sandwich approach is appropriate. According to Bill Schreiner, CEO of TwoMinuteFeedback, “there are some employees who need to know ‘everything is okay’ before you give them a correction. Otherwise they worry about their ‘status’ with you and that was not the point.” If that’s the case, you should reassure the employee that their status with you and the organization is all good and then give corrective feedback, so they are open to it and can put the feedback in the proper context.

• State your intent. Here’s a scenario in which a manager gives constructive feedback to two employees. Notice how clearly the manager defines the focus and sequence of the meeting. The employees are empowered to share their side of the story, which makes for a much more collaborative process.

“Alex and Stacey, I want to talk with you because I have some concerns. The presentation you gave to the senior leadership team this morning may have created confusion about our strategy. Let me tell you how I’d like to approach this meeting and see if it works for you. I want to start by describing what I saw that raised my concerns and see if you saw the same things. After we agree on what happened, I want to say more about my concerns and see if you share them. Then we can decide what, if anything, we need to do going forward. I’m open to the possibility that I may be missing things or that I contributed the concerns I’m raising. How does that work for you?”

This transparent approach is more effective than the sandwich approach for several reasons. First, by sharing your strategy and asking them if it will work, you, Alex, and Stacey jointly design the meeting process, increasing the chance that you will all learn from it. Second, because everyone knows the planned sequence of the meeting, everyone can work jointly to keep the meeting on track. Finally, by expressing that you may not have all the information and that you may even have contributed to the problem, you shift the meeting from one in which you’re simply telling Alex and Stacey what you think to a meeting in which all of you are exploring together what happened and planning how to move forward.

Harvard Business Review

• Use and instead of but. One way to avoid triggering your employee’s defenses is to substitute “and” where you would normally use “but.” This approach requires you to think about the goal you want to achieve and how you would convey what’s in it for your employee. Here’s how Bill Gross, CEO of Idealab, delivered feedback to a very smart, but un-communicative employee:

“James, the ideas and strategic thinking you are bringing to our company are so valuable, AND, you would be even more valuable to us if we can integrate your thinking into all the plans of the rest of the senior team. I want to take the things that you are thinking about, which are right on the money, and get them shared with everyone so that we can move together faster. I want to encourage you when you feel like you have a new direction we should take to share it with all of us early, before you put the idea in place, and I think that will make us even more successful.”

• Get feedback on your feedback.  All of the planning and forethought you put into this process mean nothing if you don’t give your employee an opportunity to speak up.

• Create an action plan and schedule further feedback sessions. The action plan should include clear expectations, due dates, and the areas of improvement which you and the employee have discussed.

Employees:

• Be an active listener. Make eye contact and display open body language.

• Follow the Ancient Greek aphorism – “Know Thyself .“ Think about how you normally react to feedback. Do you defend yourself right from the start? Are you overly sensitive? Do you concentrate on who is giving the feedback, rather than its content? Answering these questions will prevent you from making snap judgments and setting off emotional triggers.

• Ask clarifying questions, but don’t be defensive. Even if you believe the feedback is off-base, defending yourself sends a signal to your manager that you are not being receptive. Yes, criticism hurts and our self-worth and ego could possibly take a hit, but you don’t want to shut down future criticism, or be labeled as “uncoachable” in your organization. Therefore, use this opportunity to acquire knowledge about your performance and not to reenact an episode of “Law & Order.”

• Unpack the feedback. Kevin Kruse, contributor for Forbes, recommends responding to feedback with “Thank you” and then slowly evaluating its merits:

Just as you shouldn’t summarily reject feedback, you shouldn’t automatically accept it either. Get in the practice of evaluating the feedback slowly. Chew on it for a day or more. Does the criticism seem true; is it something you already knew was a limitation? Does the giver have expertise or credibility to make their observation? Have other people said similar things to you?

• Feedback to your boss? Maybe. This is a tricky subject. Experts advise to hold off on giving feedback if you are not sure whether your boss wants it, or if the subject of the feedback is a sensitive one. Ideally, your boss would’ve already created an atmosphere in which it’s safe to provide feedback. But what if this isn’t so clear?

…in the real world this may not always happen. If your boss does not directly request feedback, you can ask if she would like feedback. This is often most easily done in the context of a new project or new client. You can say something like “Would it be helpful to you for me to give you feedback at certain points in this project?” or “I’m likely to have a unique perspective on what we’re doing, would you like some feedback about how the project is going?” Again, these questions must be presented with the best of intentions. Since it is her job to give you feedback, avoid sounding like you want to give feedback in a vengeful way. Demonstrate your willingness to help her improve.

Harvard Business Review, How To Give Your Boss feedback

The same article lists these useful principles on how to give your boss feedback:

Do:

• Be certain your boss is open and receptive to feedback before speaking up
• Share with her what you are seeing and hearing in her organization or unit
• Focus on how you can help her improve, not on what you would do if you were boss

Don’t:

• Assume your boss doesn’t want feedback if she doesn’t request it — ask if she would like to hear your insight
• Presume you know or appreciate your boss’s full situation
• Give feedback as way to get back at your boss for giving you negative feedback

The Feedback App

For a lot of people, feedback is just another thing they have to deal with on top of their duties. This is because, as important as it is, feedback hasn’t been incorporated into traditional HR software tools. But things are changing quickly.

The intersection between employee engagement and technology has inspired a lot of companies to carve their niche in the HR software field. In Feedback Is The Killer App: A New Market and Management Model Emerges, Josh Bersin explains the significance of this emerging market:

These new tools, and there are dozens of them, threaten to disrupt the market for traditional engagement surveys – and even better, change the way we run our companies. They let people frequently and anonymously comment on the workplace, they let employees rate their manager and leadership, and they let line managers and team leaders rapidly “pulse” their people to get direct feedback.

By encouraging transparency, frequent feedback, and task management, these applications produce the most valuable data a company could have in addressing employee engagement. As more millennials enter the workforce and concepts like employee engagement and performance management become redesigned from the inside out, these new HR+Tech tools will determine a company’s competitiveness and willingness to adapt to a changing work culture.

What does this mean for the future of feedback in the workplace?

By using this new breed of HR technology tools, companies will be able to foster feedback that’s not only more frequent, but also more intentional. However, this will only be possible in companies where feedback is valued, by both employee and managers, as a catalyst for constant improvement. In teams where curiosity, communication, and cooperation run high these tools could produce incredible results.

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