Feedback in the workplace

In our “Delivering Effective Feedback” workshops, we explore participants’ experiences of feedback, and we find, of all the feedback they’ve received so far in their career, roughly:

25% of feedback contributed to their performance and/or wellbeing at work.
50% wasn’t useful and didn’t contribute to their performance or wellbeing.
25% was actually detrimental to their performance and/or wellbeing.

So this seemed like an excellent avenue to explore in our Psychological Safety Research Pulse.

We asked “Over the course of your career, how often has feedback had each of the following effects?” with options ranging from “Never” to “Always” in response to:

Contributed to your learning or development
Undermined your confidence or motivation
Felt irrelevant or had no impact

We also asked “Thinking about the feedback you’ve received throughout your professional career, how has it generally affected your sense of psychological safety?” with options ranging from “Much less safe” to “Much more safe”. 61 people completed the survey.

These results are interesting, and reflect what we hear in our workshops too. Let’s dive in.

The Impact of Feedback in the Workplace

The good news first: Around two-thirds of people reported that feedback at work often or sometimes helped them learn and grow professionally.

However, there’s a lot of room for improvement:

Two-thirds felt that feedback sometimes or often felt irrelevant or had no impact, and around 80% of respondents stated that feedback sometimes or often undermined their confidence or motivation. Given that 70% of respondents also felt that feedback often has a positive impact, this indicates that it’s not fundamentally feedback that’s the problem – it’s how it’s delivered.

It also suggests that the same feedback can simultaneously have both positive and negative effects on the person receiving it. It may contribute to learning, and also undermine confidence – so we should strive to deliver feedback in ways that maximise the positive impact whilst minimising the negative.

Effects of Feedback on Psychological Safety

We wanted to examine the general effect of feedback on psychological safety at work. No respondents chose “0 (Much less safe)”, which is good news! The mean average response was 2.94, and the median was 3: “No effect”, right in the middle. However, in an interesting binomial distribution, 42% of respondents felt that in general, feedback has made them feel less psychologically safe, whilst 39% reported the opposite – that it made them feel more safe.

This clustering at two points indicates that there is a wide variation in how feedback is delivered: a lot of it is done fairly well, but a lot of it is not. Two groups emerge:

A group of respondents for whom feedback somewhat improves their psychological safety.
Another significant group for whom feedback generally makes them feel somewhat less psychologically safe.

Why might this be the case?

Differences in feedback quality or style: Perhaps some respondents consistently receive feedback delivered poorly, affecting their psychological safety.
Differences in roles or contexts: Certain roles, managers, or industries might be better or worse at delivering psychologically safe feedback.
Individual differences: Feedback is subjective. Different personality traits, beliefs and values might mean people perceive feedback in different ways.

What does this mean in practice?

Feedback isn’t fulfilling its full potential. While it often contributes positively to learning, it can also undermine motivation, feel irrelevant, and most critically, often fail to enhance, or even reduce psychological safety.

Fundamentally, people who provide feedback may need to work on delivering it constructively, empathetically, and clearly, ensuring it’s relevant and actionable rather than undermining or confusing. Given that 80% of people feel that feedback through their career has sometimes or often been harmful, we can clearly do a lot better.

Delivering Effective Feedback Online Workshop

Our next Delivering Effective Feedback online workshop is scheduled for 23 September 2025, and you can sign up here. We cover everything from principles and approaches to practical tools, mechanisms and traps to avoid.