Ask HN: Do we really need performance feedback?
Hi, In companies i have seen 360 degree performance review system where coworkers rate each other. However, this activity is not useful as everybody remembers the most recent performance and give feedback based upon that and sometimes it is biased where coworkers rate each other well. There are continuous feedback solutions as well but just on organization level.
My question is: in order to grow professionally, is feedback 'really' an importance factor in our growth? Is there another effective way to get it? Anonymous or known? Is this problem fixable because usually employees don't really pay attention to it feedback obtained through such process Yes, feedback is essential for growth. Without it, you can't grow any farther or faster than your own ability to evaluate yourself and decide how to improve. Annual performance reviews aren't a good feedback tool. They are much too slow, and usually also too big and generalized. What you really need is fast specific feedback (within a week, focused on one event, action-focused). With that said, if you want to grow, don't ignore your annual review. It may be the only feedback you get from some people, so analyze it and extract whatever information you can to help yourself grow. If you're a manager and your organization requires performance reviews, it's probably not worth the effort to fight them. Instead, work on giving your team feedback fast, specific throughout the year to help them grow. And do a good job on the annual reviews for their other purpose, which is recording performance for salary and promotion decisions. Thanks for your insights!
I generally agree that feedback is important. Theoretically people should follow and gain from it. I started pleasantfish.com, a skills feedback platform where people could get anonymous feedback from their current and previous colleagues about their skills and qualities. But i generally saw people are either not interested in getting them reviewed much and even if they get feedback they are not much interested in improving upen feedback(asked through user feedback) which actually brought me to this question. So i think somehow feedback has to be actionable and gives a plan of action to user in such a manner that he effortlessly tries to improve those things in his daily routine be it reading related articles or what. But users generally tend to be lazy which is why feedback in the end seems to be useless for them. Oh, ok. I was mostly talking about how an individual can get maximum benefit from feedback. One of the biggest sources of growth for me has been actively engaging and acting on the feedback I receive. For more on that, I strongly recommend Thanks for the Feedback by Sheila Heen. You're right that it's hard to get others to learn from feedback if they don't actively work at it. You can make your feedback easier to understand and more action-oriented. But if they're lazy or even just focused differently, your feedback to them won't be very effective. As a manager, I think it's still worthwhile to give as much feedback as I can. Some of it might be heard and acted on, which will help the receiver grow. Where "grow" means "behave like the manager thinks is beneficial for the company". http://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind.h... Probably better than "Thanks for the Feedback" by Sheila Heen. Yeah, most feedback is going to come from what the giver feels is important, and a manager will usually prioritize what the company needs. A good manager will also prioritize the employee's own goals, but not every manager (or company) is mature enough to do both at the same time. But that doesn't mean that you as an individual can't get value from the feedback you receive. You just have to process it intentionally, instead of taking it at face value. That's one of my favorite points in Thanks for the Feedback. I still think if it incentivizes users in a very straightforward way then this is useful to them. In my reply to drakonka, i mention how it can be used in the career to be a super useful thing not only to them but to the companies where they work or intend to work as well. Do you think it should be done that way? Yes, that would be very interesting. As a hiring manager, I wouldn't make a decision based solely on that information, but I definitely would use it if it was available. Yes exactly! Cannot base the decision entirely on that but atleast the insights can be really interesting. It would be great if you can check out this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142878) and then give your related feedback. This is how i am trying to tackle this problem. From the feedback that i have got from this thread, however, feedback is a very personal thing and users who really want to improve themselves don't have a solution right now where they can privately request their coworkers(former or present) for this information and not get potentially penalized for it (if negative) by their existing managers in the performance review meetings. Does "don't add your 2 cents" [1] contradict what you said? Honest feedback is important for growth, yes, but be ultra skeptical of peoples motives. Your manager may be downplaying your contributions to avoid having to give you a raise or to discourage you from seeking employment elsewhere. Indeed a very valid point. Feedback has to be obtained at an individual level and it has to be given just for one purpose of constructive employee growth. I posted my comment summing up all the answers here and how i am trying to tackle these problems in my startup pleasantfish.com Feedback works when it is fairly instant, friendly and most of all fair. If you have to do X, Y and Z in n amount of time and you fail then a quick chat about why failed is very useful whilst the issues are fresh in peoples minds. If you have to wait a few months for your next review then no one really remembers the intricacies of the event, so you aren't really able to flesh out what went wrong or what can be improved. The friendliness part is vital too. Reviews can easily turn too formal and intimidating, putting the employee on the defensive. Most employees don't want to under performs so don't treat them like they are being accused of something bad. And I cannot under estimate the fairness part. Only review based on established criteria. Be objective, not subjective. If you let other employees offer feedback then force them to provide evidence and don't just accept their opinion as provided. I was once told by manager that he was family friendly and he was flexible about arrival times, so long as I put the hours in and got the work done. When I took advantage of this for just one week I was given a beating in my review for poor punctuality. When I challenged my manager about his claim to be Okay with this his response was "Do you have that in writing?". I resigned a week later. They begged me stay I refused. > Feedback works when it is fairly instant, friendly and most of all fair. Well said. I assume that by "friendly", you imply "constructive". Also: "How to Offer Constructive Feedback & Recognition" [0] and "How to Give Effective Feedback" [1]. [0] http://www.usc.edu/programs/cwfl/assets/pdf/constructive_fee... [1] http://www.unh.edu/hr/sites/unh.edu.hr/files/pdfs/tool-2.pdf Yep, even if they are bringing up a serious issue they should phrase it as positively as possible. So, instead of "I'm really unhappy that you are missing targets." say "I notice you're having a bit of an issue with targets, is there anything I can help you with?" Constructive feedback is all what is needed and the only motive it should be given is to enhance individual productivity and grow him as a better professional. I find that feedback is important, but there are better ways of doing it than annual performance reviews. We need feedback because without it, we have trouble objectively gauging how well we are doing. To start, doing a performance review once a year leaves huge gaps in feedback. Feedback needs to be immediate. Telling someone that they did something great or sub-optimal 11 months ago is useless. Second, everyone needs feedback. Feedback should not only flow from managers to employees. I would argue that managers need feedback even more than employees. Managers needs to know what is going on in their organization. The are usually well aware of the core topics (sales if you're sales manager, state of code if you're managing developers). However, good feedback should be about everything, including how people feel, what else is going well or not too well, if there is anything that they could suggest for improvement, or if anything is blocking their progress. Thirdly, feedback should not only be a one way process. All good feedback should be a start of a conversation. People will listen to feedback better if it is presented as part of a two-way communication process. I am currently working with 15Five.com to build a better feedback platform and to address the shortcomings of annual feedback systems. hey koliber, good work at 15Five.com . Basically i am trying to tackle the same problem which is why i posted this question. I made a comment above summing up all the good feedback in this thread. Your feedback will be appreciated. I think (and have experienced from both sides) that feedback is very important for growth and for mental wellbeing as well. Feedback should be continuous though, yearly/twice a year is not enough. Feedback should be coming from everyone you work with, not only your manager. Feedback helps you calibrate yourself and also helps in setting goals that are relevant. That said, you should definitely work on your self-consciousness so you can start being more objective about yourself, but that can be a loooong journey. It's also important to know the context of the feedbacks you're getting. If you pissed off someone once and that person gives you a negative feedback just because of one situation, know that it might not be unbiased. Also ask for specific examples when getting feedback. It should be a live, active communication rather some abstracted-out isolated way of communicating. If you don't understand something or you see something you don't agree with just talk to the person, ask for clarification, examples. I taught in a high school for 5 years. I learned one very important thing: you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I only noticed after that experience that in my previous 25 years as a programmer the vast majority of people ignored my advice (even when they asked for it!) Generally speaking, I've found that people have a preconceived notion of an answer when they solicit feedback for something. Then they go shopping around for the person who will answer with the feedback that they expect. When you give unsolicited feedback the effect is even stronger -- people simply do not want to believe that their expectations do not mesh with the real world. The end result is that if you give good feedback and are saying things that the person knows already, it's not very effective because they already know it. If you give feedback and the person is surprised by it, they will disregard it unless forced to confront it. Forcing people to confront their incorrect understanding sometimes works, but rarely (Think... how many students shape up after failing a test? Some do, but the vast majority simply fall into a pattern of failure). My most successful pattern of "feedback" is to simply provide support. If someone requires feedback, I rather ask them what they think of the situation. If it matches my opinion, then I encourage them to continue. If it doesn't, I do nothing until the situation reaches a head -- then I offer my assistance to help. Usually if the person is desperate they will also be open to new ideas. Allowing people to fail is the best way to help them learn. Sometimes it can be costly, though. If the cost gets to be too high, you might have to intervene, but that's not a "regular feedback" kind of thing. Just to clarify, though, most people require a different kind of feedback -- "You are a nice person. I enjoy working with you. I like it when you do X." It makes them feel comfortable and able to do their work. That kind of encouragement is often lacking in the workplace (and in schools, unfortunately). It helps to make a point of saying nice things whenever you notice them. At school I literally made a chart with all my students on it and I checked off whenever I noticed something they did right (and commented on it). If someone was missing ticks I would dedicate myself to watching them all day to catch them doing something right (try not to be creepy about it ;-) ) Edit: If you are wanting to write software, I would love a chart that I could put all my colleagues on where I could write nice things when I saw them. It would be awesome if it had alarms to tell me when I wasn't encouraging certain people, etc. I'd pay money for that. This. Feedback too often falls into the "I need to say something not great/bad, so we keep improving", instead of listening when someone asks for support. People performs better when confident their contribution is important and are confortable asking for help when needed. hey mikechar, thanks for your excellent insights. I think we can agree that whosoever wants to improve themselves they listen to the feedback given to them and who so doesn't its useless to them. So if someone really needs it there has to be a mechanism to be given to it (which basically i am trying to address in my startup i mentioned above in the comment i did). I would love to hear your thoughts on that. If I'm trying to follow my own advice, I suppose now is the time where I'm supposed to smile, tell you to do your best and offer you support if you run into trouble :-). It's true that some people are really excellent at listening to people and incorporating feedback. I don't really know if those people find that they lack opportunities for feedback. Just to quote you: > whosoever wants to improve themselves they listen to the feedback given to them and who so doesn't its useless to them. So if someone really needs it there has to be a mechanism to be given to it. If you start with this assumption, then there is no need to ask your question ("Do we really need performance feedback?"), because you have assumed your answer. I think you know that :-) Forgive me for what will seem like going off on a tangent, but let me tell you a quick story about when I was teaching. I taught English as a foreign language to Japanese high school students. Their text book was terrible and I avoided it, but one section was not too bad. I asked the students to bring in their text book the next day. I spoke English, but it was simple English that they all knew and everyone seemed to understand. The next day, not a single person brought their text book. I asked them if they remembered me asking about it. Out of 30 people, not one person remembered me saying anything at all. Luckily, another teacher was in the room when I had asked, so I could verify that it wasn't just me going crazy. I had asked them, and not one of the students remembered the event at all. You might think (as I did) that at the very least the students might remember me saying something that they didn't understand at the end of class. As it turns out, that's not the way memory works. If you don't understand something, or if your reject it in some way, you are likely not to remember that the event happened at all! In the same way, many people complain that they never get feedback. They feel that this is the reason that they can not improve. If only someone would give them feedback! However, I think it is likely that when people are poor at receiving feedback, their brains filter out the events leading them to believe that the fault lies with others. To be honest, I believe that this happens with many other things as well ;-) My personal suspicion is that by providing another feedback mechanism, you may be serving a small audience which is already well served by traditional means. Those people who react well to feedback do not seem to have trouble cultivating it, in my experience. People who reject feedback think that it is rare because they don't internalise it. They are probably the much bigger market, but they are not a market that will benefit from more feedback. If it were me, I think I might try to turn my mind to trying to find out what these people need. Hope that helps. Good luck! Feedback from my direct managers is fairly important for me. Anonymous feedback from some peers helps with that as it gives the manager an idea of what working with me is like to my coworkers. If I'm doing my job well I want to know about it because it reminds me not to doubt myself and stay on course. If I need to do something different I want to know about it early so that I can course-correct before it becomes a problem. I have a rhetorical question here. When you say that anonymous feedback gives manager the idea of what working with me is like to my coworkers, do you think this information is useful for and should actually be allowed to share with potential employers and recruiting managers? Shouldn't they have a right to this information? For example: when a candidate mentions "references" on his resume, they are always meant to give positive feedback about them which is why again its broken. However, imagine of a platform allowing users to get anonymous 360 feedback from former and current colleagues and this information to be only shareable with recruiting manager of jobs they apply on. If a user shows certain transition and improvements ij their qualities then that would mean they're really working on the feedback they receive and as a hiring manager i would definitely want to hire that guy. Problem with that is a lot of people would never want this information to go out and made available to the hiring comitttees as it will reveal too much about them. However, that's the only way i find this fixable! That suddenly makes the comments I give someone in feedback vital to their future job so being at all negative would be seen as a big punishment. > For example: when a candidate mentions "references" on his resume, they are always meant to give positive feedback about them which is why again its broken. Many jobs don't give any feedback at all. The purpose is to prove that you did, in fact, work there with that title for that duration. General question: are un-vetted reviews about someone by completely unknown people a reliable indicator of future performance? If places don't give reliably truthful reviews, why would you expect that the 360 feedback wouldn't turn into exactly the same thing? Interesting, but I don't think that this would be a good idea. Different companies structure performance reviews in different ways, so I think that feedback from peers is important and useful to managers who are in the company and familiar with how the company/team/processes work. I feel the best way to explain my reasoning is to explain a little about how the performance process works at my company: We have a day-to-day manager (a person on the project team managing your sprint goals, day to day decisions, etc) and a "line" manager - a manager who is more HR and keeps an eye on your performance, project staffing, professional development, goals, etc. You get feedback from both, but the line manager is the person who handles the formal performance review process, reviews peer feedback, handles the promotion process, etc. This is the person you meet with at least once a month to talk about your general progress, how you're feeling in the role, how effective you are, tensions in relationships with others on the team, etc. You can pick who you ask for your feedback (so you are free to pick people you get along with, although I tend to pick people from different disciplines who I think could provide useful information). The line manager then also speaks to your day to day manager and other people they feel are relevant but whom you may not have picked. All of this, I feel, builds a fairly good picture of your performance coupled with the line manager's knowledge of the project, company, team members involved. The line manager then interprets all of this to the best of their ability and communicates it to you. In other words you have some level of certainty that the in-house manager doing your performance review will most of the time have a good idea of the environment and the context in which reviews are given. You can usually trust their interpretation of the feedback and overall situation (or have a discussion about why you might disagree with a certain point). An outside hiring manager presented with a pile of historical feedback probably won't be able to interpret it very effectively - they won't know what was happening in the project, who the other people are or what their biases may be, etc. This can easily result in a totally inaccurate impression of the candidate. Unsolicitated feedback: Between people seeking revenge for real or perceived slights, people who don't believe the feedback is fair, lawsuits over same, the site would drown. Plus who would sign up to enable others to have anonymous feedback about them? If you are really good you would get hired without it, so it would be a sign that, at most, the person is a solid B-player and likely a C player. Would you hire such a person? I think feedback is very important for growth. I listen closely to it. The problem with 360s in my company is that when you give ideas for improvement you can't know if the manager will make this a negative. This happened to me once: I put a well-intended point of improvement into the review of somebody I really like and respect. The manager made this (I was told later) the main point of the yearly review and it impacted the coworker negatively. Since then I have kept my 360s pretty bland and not really saying anything. Review systems can/could be extremely valuable but it's hard to implement them in way that they really work. They work probably best where management is genuinely interested in the growth of employees. I am not sure. Perhaps for people that want to grow their roles in organisations, it's important. As a freelancer, I am happy to live without this ritual. In the past, before I became freelancer, I dreaded these reviews, as I suspected often these performance reviews could be politically charged and not necessarily deal with my performance (for example a manager might tell me I need to improve some aspects for a raise - I might have to suck up to some manager to get more chance for a big raise, when a limited budget is available for a group of employees). As a freelancer I am free to decide on the aspects I want to improve on and as such I don't need a manager to help me with this. This makes me much happier. Having both freelanced and currently working full time, I feel that feedback is a significant benefit of working full time. As joshyeager says in this thread, "Yes, feedback is essential for growth. Without it, you can't grow any farther or faster than your own ability to evaluate yourself and decide how to improve.", and I agree with this. This is something that is just missing when you are working by yourself as a freelancer. I could be a good coder, but crappy co-worker and I'd never know that if I just work by-my-self. Personally, I'm an OK programmer. But I used to be crap at teaching people. I freelanced for almost 7 years before I joined my first programming gig, and this is one of the first things I learned. Without feedback from my colleagues, I would never even have found out about it, unless I had gone out of my way to get myself involved in teaching. And the way I look at it, feedback from your co-workers doesn't just improve you as an employee, it usually helps you grow as a person as well, and fix some error of your personality or character. For me, improving the way I try to teach things to my peers made me a better programmer, and [plug]helped me a lot while I was writing my book (https://www.amazon.com/Django-Project-Blueprints-Jibran-Ahme.... As a freelancer, its totally different. For them, i think recommendations and reviews are definitely way more important from clients which allows you to build a profile. You need feedback, yes. But perhaps not (or not only) on the annual review level, but rather solicit feedback from peers and superiors on a per-project level (or if you work in a Scrum team, per epos or something). If you get such feedback maybe every two or three months, and then you get a bad annual performance review, you might even use the feedback you collected privately to influence the annual performance review. Exactly feedback has to be given on continuous basis and based upon the real performances on the projects. Not just on annual basis. Thanks for your responses guys! Some excellent answers were given. To sum it all up: 1. Feedback is great, it helps employees develop and improve themselves.
2. The way feedback is obtained in organizations is broken and somehow it acts as a tool by managers to penalize the employees during their performance appraisals meetings. 3. Feedback has to be given in a very constructive manner so that the receiver actually tries to improve it without feeling bad about themselves. 4. Feedback has to be continuous and we cannot except feedback to be delivered only on yearly or bi-annual basis. Real time, contextual feedback is needed. 5. Feedback not only on tech capabilities is needed but also on interpersonal relationships, management/leadership style, professionalism and much more. 6. Most important of all, feedback is a personal thing. It should be requested by the user himself if the idea is to improve themselves and to improve their performance and in no way it should be related to appraisals. All this feedback is definitely used for improvement and growth and to make yourself a better professional. I had similar thoughts in my mind when i posted this question. Because my latest project that I posted here(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142878) and here (https://medium.com/@aliibrahim_36896/story-of-pleasantfish-a...) exactly tries to tackle the discussed problems. This is as we know a not simple problem (and also not easily understandable in the first go) so therefore my solution i believe is far from perfect but to start I have separated feedback from organization level to individual level just for personal growth purposes. Also, to allow users to grow, i recommend articles/stories to improve those skills. I would like to thank you all as I have gained valuable feedback information from this thread tech professionals and for growth feedback was a necessary ingredient. Performance feedback should be quicker and on the spot.
we spent most of our day with our colleagues it's hard to get honest and real feedback now a days. Managers should focus on positive feedback too. A good article about skill feedback.
Don’t add your 2 cents
https://t.co/TVo6TQ7SQU Most great people I've seen have had great mentors guide them along the way. Very few great tennis players do it without a coach. Same with piano. And chess. Why should programming or leadership be so different? This doesn't mean feedback is easy to give or receive, or that everyone listens. Informal feedback is very important. Formal, 360 type, feedback in my experience almost never reflects reality and is often very much counter productive. Demming made it one of his 7 deadly diseases for a reason. Would you like somebody to tell you if you smell? Same thing. If the idea is to make them aware of it and help them get rid of it. Why not? :) need hackers for hire? need to keep an eye on your spouse by gaining access to their emails?, want to know what your kids do on social medias?facebook ,twitter,. We can get the job done.change of grades?,social media hacking- blakejohn78@yahoo.com text @ 6624932362 In the real world performance review is useless. Would you trust Trump's reviews of Hillary as a cabinet leader or Hillary's reviews of Trump as a businessman? In the real world people just go through the motions of performance reviews and management doesn't care about feedback until they want someone gone. I have seen people completely delusional that they are so far ahead of everyone else and are uniquely qualified to pass judgement on everyone but not receive any. Their ability to maintain their belief is amazing. It's part of their identity and their need to have power. People cannot be trusted to give impartial feedback about their competitors. I had to leave many of those people behind to advance my career. They continue on in their low paying middle management or developer jobs. If you work in an environment where it is somehow beneficial for you to view your colleagues as competitors, maybe that's a problem in itself.