Feedback? Why bother?
Summary
In a psychologically safe workplace, people share feedback freely. But when feedback lands on deaf ears, it fosters feedback fatigue. Amy Edmondson describes such fatigue as a “serious risk factor”. In this post, I describe how toxic positivity, celebrations that ignore underlying problems and corporate bullshit create a climate of silence. I also describe how leaders can avoid feedback and promote an ongoing feedback loop.
Amy Edmondson is a legend. She’s among the first people to make psychological safety a first-class topic of discussion in corporations. In her book, “The Fearless Organisation”, Professor Edmondson addresses several symptoms of organisations with poor psychological safety. One of them is what she calls an “epidemic of silence”. Across many companies, people don’t share honest feedback even if they believe it’ll benefit their customers, team or employers.
There are many underlying reasons for this epidemic of silence, which you can uncover with a five whys exercise. I’m sure that one of the whys in most companies will be what Professor Edmondson summarises as the sense of futility - i.e. “It won’t matter anyway; why bother?”.
About 17 years ago, Randy Pausch delivered a talk that broke the internet. Randy discussed a reflection from an assistant coach in one of his anecdotes about high school football.
“When you're screwing up, and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. That's a very bad place to be. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care.”
It’s fair to say that employees who embrace silence have given up on their work environment. Of course, it’s possible that employers have orchestrated silence by design, but for workplaces that value feedback, silence can stifle creativity, experimentation and improvement.
The feedback loop - a virtuous cycle
Feedback is a cyclical process. In its simplest form, you can imagine that it follows a pattern.
It all starts when people observe specific patterns and behaviours around them. Out-of-the-ordinary patterns and behaviours often stand out. These cues become triggers for feedback.
People respond to these triggers by speaking up about how they feel. The trigger can have a positive or a negative impact, but when people share feedback, they usually want a positive outcome.
After speaking up, people often wait for that positive outcome for what they believe is a reasonable time. If they notice a positive change, it encourages them to observe their environment for more cues. The cues then lead them to speak up, and so on.
How the feedback loop works
But what if there’s no change? That is when the feedback loop breaks down.
The critics who give up
Have you ever been in retrospective meetings where people discuss ideas, but nothing changes? What about employer-run surveys where you share honest feedback but see no improvements or follow-ups? How about focus groups and feedback sessions with line managers or senior leaders where much talk leads to little or no action?
If you’ve had any of the above experiences, I suspect they don’t encourage you to speak up the next time. Before you know it, retrospectives have become a tick-box activity; only recent hires respond to surveys, and people gloss over the real, hard problems in interactions with management. I wish this were as bad as it could get, but no! It can get worse.
Toxic positivity creates feedback fatigue
Workplaces can become museums of inanities. For example, a friend told me about her company, where a CxO had announced layoffs. Actually, scratch that. She had announced “restructuring”. The CxO’s note was a case study of how positive phrasing can obscure the actual message. Here are a few examples of that upbeat language, a.k.a; bullshit.
“Pioneering groundbreaking solutions”
“Revolutionarily impactful”
“Streamlining operational intricacies”
“Rationalising our workforce”
“Capitalise on this strategic inflexion point”
“Achieve peak productivity”
“United, collaborative effort”
“Rise with reinforced vigour”
If you’ve been the victim of layoffs, you have my sympathies—particularly if you hear toxic but seemingly positive euphemisms for the hard truth. Layoffs are hardly the only place where employers dress up the truth. Let me give you a few more examples.
| What happens | What employees see |
|---|---|
| Employees respond to surveys about workplace satisfaction and share candid feedback about areas where the employers can improve. | No response to the feedback, but an announcement from the head of HR that the company is a “great place to work”. |
| People complain about poor IT systems and share ideas to improve their digital work experience. | The company announces the CIO’s latest award for creating an “innovative digital workplace.” |
| Your project is a death march. People are burning out, working overtime and on weekends. Everyone shared their concerns and asked for a sustainable pace. | Your engineering head glosses over these concerns as they send out an email announcing the latest successful release of your project and praising your team’s “tireless, hard work.” |
| Management knows that people have questions and concerns related to contentious issues. | Management doesn’t create a forum to address these questions asynchronously. All-hands meetings include several minutes of one-way, celebratory presentations and updates and conclude with a few minutes of obligatory Q&A where most questions don’t get an answer. |
When leaders ignore feedback and use management speak and corporate bullshit to skirt around problems, it leaves no incentive for further feedback. People argue that they’ve already shared input that no one’s acted on, so why should they waste their time on another round? That’s what we call feedback fatigue.
The most significant impact, however, is on psychological safety. When leaders ignore feedback regularly, it tells people that management is pursuing an editorial line. If someone’s feedback is likely against that editorial line, they’ll often choose silence. People always weigh the present against the future. It doesn’t matter that feedback or speaking up can lead to a better workplace in the long run. If staying silent “feels safer,” then that’s what people will choose.
A climate in which people err on the side of silence — implicitly favouring self-protection and embarrassment avoidance over the possibility that one's input may be desperately needed in that moment — is a serious risk factor.
Encouraging the feedback loop
Running a retrospective meeting, a survey, or a focus group, is easy. It’s harder to follow up on the themes and actions that emerge. Every company and every leader has a finite capacity to deal with feedback. The first step is to acknowledge this finite capacity. It’s better to say, “There are some things we can’t change right now”, than to say, “All feedback is welcome”; only to ignore a heap of feedback.
Candour helps. Once you’ve synthesised feedback, can you tell people what feedback you will act on? Can you explain why you won’t act on particular feedback? Maybe the feedback is misaligned to your team or company’s direction? What can you do to set the right expectations? Perhaps you will act on some input at a later time. Can you share that time horizon with people? The key is to acknowledge feedback. People are okay with being patient, but no one enjoys being ignored!
Transparency helps, too. For example, if you conduct retrospective meetings, where do you track the actions from these gatherings? Ideally, these actions should be on the team’s wall of work so they get the importance they deserve and the team can see progress on the issues they care about. The same principle applies to survey feedback, one-on-one meetings, skip-level meetings and focus groups. Make your actions transparent. Show people you’re addressing their feedback.
And last, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Don’t ask for more feedback before showing improvements or changes. You’re better off recruiting people to implement changes than wasting their time with a fresh round of feedback you’ll inevitably ignore. Each round of ignored feedback wastes time, eroding people’s trust, breaking the feedback loop, and creating feedback fatigue.
Feedback is the backbone of any workplace that wants to be on top of its game. Be afraid, even terrified, of the contagion of silence — a serious risk factor, as Edmondson said. She also said, “It is far better for people to ask questions or raise concerns and be wrong than it is for them to hold back”, and that “for voice to be effective requires a culture of listening”. Do what Amy says. Listen. Acknowledge. Respond. You’ll see the reward in the feedback loop!