How to manage feedback overload

Feedback is having a moment. Whether it’s a restaurant, an online vendor, or a doctor, everyone you patronize seems to be asking for your thoughts. In business, seeking employee feedback is particularly important, as it can affect turnover, productivity, and the bottom line.

But feedback can become too much of a good thing, says Ethan Burris, professor of management at Texas McCombs. He’s a nationally known expert on workplace communication who has studied whom to talk to and how to get a boss’s ear.

For recent research, he interviewed more than two dozen multinational executives and human resources leaders about how they cope with feedback overload. He learned some surprising lessons about how they translate feedback into action. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Research usually comes with some expectations about the outcome. Did your initial ideas get altered?

There are some broadly held assumptions across the U.S. that voice should be universally a good thing. Leaders should want to cultivate that culture. Employees should want to give it. If employees speak up, that will translate to all sorts of effectiveness in terms of outcomes.

The surprising thing that we learned is that all those assumptions are wrong. If you really want feedback, you need to line up systems to manage that process effectively. People don’t want to get pinged for advice and then feel like they’ve been ignored.

How can you create systems to make practical use of employee feedback without getting overwhelmed?

Think about employee voice as an ecosystem. You certainly want to have your broad annual survey, but then you also want to have other touchpoints around important markers inside the employee life cycle: at the first 90 days, after a promotion or an internal move, exit surveys, giving feedback on your manager.

There are other routine ways to get more feedback from personnel, such as focus groups, town halls, and listening sessions.

The point is that if you don’t have a plan going in, there’s a large chance that you’re either going to miss out on important sources of feedback, or results are not going to be well integrated or used down the road.

What are some strategies for effectively using employee feedback?

We heard from companies that it’s important to be really transparent about what you’re learning.

Say that half of us like a return-to-office policy and half of us don’t. Therefore, coming up with a single policy that is broad and captures everyone will be almost impossibly difficult.

We first explain to people that here’s the disagreement, here’s what we did to uncover why the disagreements are there, and here’s our initial solution to integrate each of these interests into something that’s better.

After we take an initial action, we follow up with additional surveys that gauge how well we did. This gives us some insight into what we’re going to do next.

Do you take a series of steps, soliciting feedback after each one?

You’re not going to completely close out the issue just because you’ve taken one single action. A lot of these things are complicated, and they shift over time, so you routinely come back to the same stuff again.

As an example, hybrid work policies have shifted over time. It’s an issue that continues to come up. It’s more of an ongoing dialog between leadership and employees than something that is static.

Do companies genuinely want feedback, or is it just something they must do in the current corporate climate?

It’s a complicated answer, because some people in an organization very much do. For other people, there are lots of incentives and politics that prevent them from wanting to fully engage in it.

Employees at the lowest levels of the organization tend to want to offer feedback, because they’re the ones who are experiencing problems and inefficiencies with tasks they think could be done better.

Leaders at the very top tend to also want feedback, because they recognize they’re not on the front lines, and they need to be informed about what changes need to be made. They’re comfortable getting it, because they want to make improvements.

The middle managers are the ones who get squeezed. There’s a ton of pressure for them to perform well. The last thing they want is additional feedback pointing out all the problems and requiring additional work on top of an already full plate to compellingly address them.

So, it’s the job of those at the very top to organize these sets of systems to make it easier for those middle managers to take in that feedback and then do something useful with it.

The companies you talked to are multinational. Did different geographic locations have cultural workplace differences regarding feedback?

Even though a strong majority of employees in the companies we interviewed are U.S.-based, I wouldn’t say that this is a U.S.-centric set of findings. There are a lot of core psychological dynamics that are more human-centered and universal than they are culturally bound.

So, even though some of the norms for how you express voice or how leaders take in feedback will be a little bit different across different cultures, the general sense of the need for voice and the need to manage it well is something that is broadly shared across the world.

Ethan Burris is co-author of “Turn Employee Feedback into Action,” published in Harvard Business Review, with Benjamin Thomas, research associate at McCombs’ Center for Leadership and Ethics, and Ketaki Sodhi and Dawn Klinghoffer of Microsoft.

Story by Sharon Jayson