For many companies, employee reviews occur on a quarterly basis. As the calendar inches toward November, many people managers and their team members will have performance-based conversations to review performance in 2024 and set the table for 2025.

However, to hear it from experts, performance-centered feedback isn’t something only be offered at defined intervals.

“If the only time you ever speak with [employees] is when you’re giving them feedback, it’s not a great setup for anyone to hear you very well,” says Maren Perry, CEO and founder of Arden Coaching, a leadership coaching consultancy.

In our newest career-focused feature, the Category Management Association gets to the heart of effective feedback for employees — and offers six tips for both managers and their team members to get the most out of this vital component of corporate success.

Tip No. 1: The more often managers can give feedback, the better they will get at delivering it, and it can be a win-win for all involved.

Perry, whose clients include JLL, Mars, and Viacom, says it’s common for leaders to struggle being comfortable giving feedback. The only way to get over that, she says, is to lean into it.

“There should be ongoing feedback and a culture of feedback, because I think that allows both sides to feel more comfortable,” Perry says. “The research says that people are almost equally uncomfortable giving feedback as people are receiving feedback. The more we practice, the better we get. And that’s for both sides.”

Tip No. 2: Managers need to be vulnerable and seek out feedback from their teams.

There are scores of books on what it takes to build a culture of feedback. A recent search of Amazon alone found 165 selections on the topic.

Still, translating lessons from a page into action can be challenging, even overwhelming. How can a leader be authentically vulnerable without seeming inauthentic?

Perry suggests managers model the ability to receive and apply feedback by asking team members to give them feedback on something specific. From there, the managers apply the feedback. For the employee/individual contributor, it is an opportunity to engage with a leader in a new way. It also offers the chance to display listening skills and to provide input in a non-threatening environment while practicing and displaying leadership skills. Done correctly, the process humanizes the manager, makes the employee more comfortable speaking up, and lends itself to the building of a culture where opinions are sought and valued by all. An authentic feedback culture doesn’t get built in a day, but on the foundation of many little events like this.

Tip No. 3: Feedback should never be personal.

How do you cannonball a feedback culture?

You don’t heed Tip No. 3, and get personal. A misstep here can have significant impact both on the recipient and the giver in terms of a relationship altered, and perhaps permanently.

“The first thing I would stress is, it’s not about the person,” said Jason Huang, a professor and the director of the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. “It’s about the tasks they are performing. Talk about the tasks and the behaviors at hand. If there are specific behaviors that you want employees to exhibit or engage in, talk about the behaviors. Never make it about this employee. It’s not about the employee’s personality. It’s not about this person’s shortcomings. It’s about how you conduct yourself at work.”

Tip No. 4: Feedback, even if meant to be impersonal, can seem that way to the recipient, and it’s a huge reason employees and managers should have regular touchpoints.

Perry counsels the leaders her company works with to understand that feedback can be received a variety of ways, and that it’s all a matter of how humans are wired. She notes that feedback can trigger an “amygdala hijack,” where the “fight or flight” portion of the brain is stimulated. This is a major reason Perry’s call to build a “culture of feedback” is essential — to make it less daunting.

“Feedback triggers an emotional response,” Perry says. “We are social creatures. When we anticipate getting feedback, we have a fear that we will be ostracized or removed from the community or the group. This is a primal thing. This is not about, I’m afraid I’m going to get fired because you tell me you want me to delegate more. You get people who get aggressive when you give them feedback, you get people who retreat, or who freeze up. All of those are normal responses when there’s a tiger coming at you, but our brains have not evolved to where we are currently. So our brain can have this very primal response.

“What you’re trying to do as a manager is navigate around that response. That’s why I say the first thing is to develop that relationship so that you don’t set off that fight or flight.”

For employees and individual contributors, there is a long-standing principle that feedback is a gift. It is a critical piece of the development process. That said, sometimes feedback can hit close to home or feel like a personal attack despite the best intentions of the manager. The best advice here might be some of the oldest advice — take a deep breath and think before speaking. Let the clock help calm the waters.

Tip No. 5: Feedback around changing behaviors shouldn’t wait for a quarterly evaluation.

Huang, whose scholarly research centers on learning and development, employee hiring, psychological measurement, and adaptive performance, believes that a quarterly meeting is appropriate for a check-in on long-term targets. “That way, you have a reasonably long period of time to accumulate results,” he says. “The results would not be influenced by random fluctuations over shorter spans of time, such as weeks.”

However, he says that managers, depending upon the role, will be compelled to speak up much sooner when it comes to observations impacting job performance.

“If we’re talking about a salesperson’s job, providing feedback in a quarter is probably too long a time, because you can observe behaviors within a day and provide informal feedback to the employee,” he says. “When it comes to [that] quarterly review, then you’re really just providing a ranking of the output of the employees, identifying who did well and who did not do well. If you’re talking about changing behaviors on the job, then I hope the supervisor or manager would have done it way before the end of the quarter.”

Tip No. 6: The “sandwich” method of feedback doesn’t work well. We offer an alternative.

You may not know what the “sandwich” feedback method is, but you’ve surely experienced it. It goes like this: the first “bread slice” of the discussion is praise from your manager. The “sandwich filling” is the guidance on what needs to be worked upon. As the recipient gulps that down, the final “bread slice” is applied — more praise.

“We all know that technique and no one really thinks that great. No one feels good on the other side getting that,” Perry says.

Instead, Perry counsels the leaders she coaches to use the “SBI” method (situation, behavior, impact), created by the Center for Creative Leadership. The pillars are:

Situation: The description of a situation when a workplace/job behavior was observed, including the time, event, and the context.
Behavior: The manager lists the behavior observed, in a clear and non-judgmental fashion.
Impact: The manager details the impact of the behavior, and its effect on the manager, the team, and the work.

The key element in making SBI a closed-loop process, Perry says, is a request to the employee for something different, a clear ask or expectation for improvement. From a manager’s perspective, the important elements here are 1) ensuring progress is reviewed and 2) the employee is praised and recognized if improvement is made.

“You want to set an expectation, and you want to have a clear time when you will circle back to this conversation,” Perry says. “If it’s a manager giving a quarterly performance review, that’s kind of built in. If it’s something less formal, you want to circle back to it, either in another informal meeting or in a formal review, to make sure that you’re able to track the progress that’s been made and give positive feedback, hopefully, after they have shifted a behavior.”

This leads to another topic: what’s the right balance of positive feedback and negative feedback?

Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that the best performing teams offered 5.6 times as many positive moments of feedback as negative ones, with the lowest-performing teams getting 0.36 instances of positive feedback for every one negative feedback assessment.

Three More Points to Ponder

In addition to the guidance from our experts above, we share a few other feedback-related nuggets for managers and employees to consider.

Point No. 1: Why do some employees prove better at adjusting and adapting after feedback?

We asked Huang, whose research has focused on worker personality and adaptability, for his view.

“Emotional stability is important,” says Huang, who stressed his answer drew from his own research and was not academic consensus. “Being ambitious. [Being] achievement-orientated would also be important, especially if they are seeking out changes and they want to climb up the corporate ladder.”

Huang adds: “In general, research suggests that intelligence is important, although the effect of intelligence in recent years has weakened. Meaning two decades ago, being smart on the job was more strongly associated with the ability to perform well compared to nowadays. Researchers have conjectures as to why. For example, it could be because people need to work in teams more. Another possibility is advanced technology, especially AI, helps us manage and work well. Nevertheless, intelligence is still important to be able to perform well in general.”

Point No. 2: There is such a thing as “too much” feedback.

“You don’t want to feel like you’re under a microscope and like you’re inundated with it,” Perry tells us. The key for managers and employees, she stresses, is that feedback isn’t something viewed as a burden to deliver and receive and to be “scared of.” She advises: “Have it be regular feedback. What you’re encouraging on the other side is a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset.”

Point No. 3: Lean on ARC’s “Career Launch” in your employee feedback and follow-up.

A surefire way to promote skill improvement is by promoting DIY learning tools for employees to upskill, fill in knowledge gaps, and expand perspectives. The Association of Retail and Consumer Professionals’ Career Launch tool helps employees and employers to better understand the expected current competencies of industry roles. The feedback provided by the tool can inform managers in evaluation discussions and can provide a framework for employee improvement.

Quarterly evaluations are healthy. Promoting a culture of improvement is even healthier, and you’re not alone in your search for the right levers to pull with your teams. We’re here to help.