The Feedback You're Not Giving Is Costing Your Business

The conversation that comes too late

It is December. A manager sits down with a team member for the annual appraisal and finally says what has been bothering them since March.

The reports are always late. The client calls are rushed. The team member listens, surprised, and asks the only fair question: why am I only hearing this now?

Most of us have been on one side of that table. It is one of the most common and most avoidable failures in the workplace.

The employee lost nine months in which they could have improved. The manager lost nine months of better work. And trust took a hit that no rating form will repair.

Feedback is not a soft extra. It is how people learn what good looks like, how managers steer performance, and how organisations keep their best people.

Yet the research is consistent: most companies do it rarely, do it badly, or do it in a way that makes performance worse.

Why feedback matters more than most leaders think

It drives engagement. Gallup found that 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged.

Engaged people stay longer, serve customers better and need less supervision. Few management habits cost so little and return so much.

Frequency changes motivation. In the same research, employees whose managers give daily feedback are 3.6 times more likely to strongly agree they are motivated to do outstanding work than those who get it once a year.

Gallup’s earlier study on performance reviews found that weekly feedback makes people 2.7 times more likely to be engaged than an annual review does.

People want it, including the hard parts. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman’s research, first shared in Harvard Business Review, found that employees value corrective feedback more than many managers assume.

In their wider study of 2,700 respondents, 94% said corrective feedback improves their performance when it is presented well, and nearly two thirds believed their careers would have gone further with more of it.

It protects fairness. When feedback is regular, nothing in an appraisal comes as a surprise.

Decisions on pay, promotion or performance improvement rest on a record the employee has already seen.

That matters for trust, and in Kenya it matters for compliance too: a fair process under the Employment Act 2007 is far easier to show when concerns were raised early and documented.

Why so many companies get it wrong

1. They save it all for the annual review

Gallup reports that nearly half of employees get feedback from their manager a few times a year or less.

Only 14% strongly agree that their performance reviews inspire them to improve.

Worse, traditional reviews make performance worse about one third of the time. A once a year conversation cannot carry twelve months of coaching.

2. Managers avoid the uncomfortable part

An Interact and Harris Poll survey reported in Harvard Business Review found that 69% of managers are often uneasy communicating with employees, and 37% dislike giving direct feedback if they expect a negative reaction.

So they soften it until it means nothing, or they say nothing at all.

Zenger Folkman found the same blind spot from the other side: 62% of leaders rated themselves highly effective at honest feedback, while 60% of employees said they had received no useful feedback in the previous six months.

3. Feedback becomes a verdict on the person

In The Feedback Fallacy, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall show that more than half of any rating you give someone reflects you, not them.

Criticism framed as judgement also triggers a defensive response that blocks learning.

When Deloitte looked at its own system, it found it was spending close to 2 million hours a year on performance management, much of it producing ratings that said more about the raters than the people being rated.

4. It only flows one way

Many organisations treat feedback as something managers give and staff receive. Leaders rarely ask their teams what is getting in the way.

That one directional habit teaches people that speaking up is risky, and it leaves leaders blind to problems their teams already see.

5. They ask, then go quiet

The staff survey goes out. People answer honestly. Then nothing happens, or nothing is communicated. The next survey gets fewer and safer responses.

Asking for feedback you will not act on is worse than not asking, because it proves to people that their voice does not count.

What good feedback looks like in practice

You do not need a new system to fix this. You need a few habits, practised consistently.

Gallup’s research points to feedback that is frequent, focused and oriented to the future. Here is how that translates on the ground.

1. Make it small and often. A 15 minute check in every week or two beats a two hour appraisal once a year. Ask what is going well, what is stuck, and what support is needed.
2. Talk about the work, not the person. “The client report on Tuesday was missing the sales figures” is useful. “You are careless” is not. Specific, observable and recent is the standard.
3. Name what is working. When someone gets it right, say so and say why. Buckingham and Goodall argue that people grow most when others focus on their strengths, so point at excellence and it gets repeated.
4. Look forward. Spend less time on what went wrong and more on what the person will do next time. The goal is better work, not a better record of past mistakes.
5. Equip your managers. Many supervisors are promoted for being good at the job, not for being good with people. A short, practical session on holding a feedback conversation pays for itself quickly.
6. Make it safe to speak upward. In many of our workplaces, respect for seniority runs deep. That is a strength, but it can mean junior staff wait to be asked. So ask. “What is one thing I could do differently to help you?” is a powerful question from a manager.
7. Close the loop. After any staff survey or listening session, report back what you heard and what you will do about it. Even “we heard this, and here is why we cannot change it yet” builds trust.
8. Keep a simple record. A short note after each check in protects both sides. When the annual review comes, it summarises conversations that have already happened.

The bottom line

Feedback is not about being nice or being tough. It is about being clear, early and fair. The organisations that get it right are not the ones with the most sophisticated appraisal forms.

They are the ones where people know where they stand every week, where managers are confident having honest conversations, and where staff believe their voice changes something.

The good news is that this is fixable, and quickly. Most people problems are preventable. They need structure, fairness and someone who shows up.

At TruewardHR, we help growing organisations build performance and feedback practices that people actually use: simple check in frameworks, manager training, fair appraisal tools and staff listening that leads to action.

If your feedback still arrives once a year, let’s talk.

Sources

• Gallup, How Fast Feedback Fuels Performance, Denise McLain and Bailey Nelson, January 2022, updated 2024
• Zenger Folkman, Feedback: The Powerful Paradox, 2019
• Gallup, More Harm Than Good: The Truth About Performance Reviews, Robert Sutton and Ben Wigert, May 2019
• Harvard Business Review, The Feedback Fallacy, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, March 2019
• Harvard Business Review, Two Thirds of Managers Are Uncomfortable Communicating with Employees, Lou Solomon, March 2016
• Ragan, Survey: 69 percent of managers dislike communicating with staff, March 2016
• Harvard Business Review, Reinventing Performance Management, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, April 2015
• Harvard Business Review, Your Employees Want the Negative Feedback You Hate to Give, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, January 2014