Employees Want More Feedback

CU360
February 3, 2010 | COMMENTS

Micromanaging may have fallen out of fashion, since many employees have hardly seen their bosses during a time-consuming recession. Sixty-six percent of employees report that they have little to no interaction with their bosses, according to a recent Leadership IQ study reported in the American Society for Training and Development's T&D magazine. That's up 13% from last year's report.

Although 67% of workers reported that they get too little positive feedback, they're not just after words of recognition. Another 51% of employees said that they get too little constructive criticism from their bosses.

“Perhaps the most surprising finding was the extent to which employees are desperate for feedback,” says Mark Murphy, CEO and chairman of Leadership IQ. Good employees know that as their performance improves, so, too, do their prospects. They want highly interactive leaders who will coach, develop, and improve them.

But employees are not only experiencing a lack of feedback—the quality of that feedback is also poor. Fifty-three percent of employees reported that when their bosses do praise them, performance-related information is insufficient. In addition, 65% of workers say that when they are criticized by their bosses, they don't get enough information to correct the problem.

The recession has exacerbated the lack of meaningful engagement between supervisor and worker. Murphy notes that once the economy turned sour many managers started avoiding employees. Many employers were not prepared to answer the tough questions coming from their staff, even though communication became imperative in the stress-ridden workplace atmosphere.

Managers generally aren't taught how to give actionable feedback, says Murphy, and only 21% of employees reported that they know their job performance is where it should be. Murphy recommends that managers should roughly double the time they spend interacting with their employees and make all feedback, whether positive or negative, “highly specific and behaviorally explicit.”

To make feedback powerful, managers need to:

• Give feedback often, before it balloons into a bigger issue;
• Make clear exactly what needs to be fixed and how; and
• Avoid sugarcoating the feedback.

Too many leaders make the mistake of trying to squeeze a negative performance critique in between layers of positive reinforcement. “It's a mixed message that gets zero results,” says Murphy.