When do team members provide detailed feedback? Is it to celebrate the positive aspects of their work or to highlight areas for improvement? We analyzed more than 10,000 pieces of feedback shared on Steerio to better understand the structure and dynamics of team feedback.
Let’s face it: adopting new ways of working is challenging. Breaking our daily routines, stepping out of our comfort zones, and embracing learning is a necessary process—one that most of us would gladly skip. But remember: the journey is more important than the destination.
When we help client teams set up feedback loops (using pulse check surveys), we encounter two main forms of resistance: first, the fear of confronting the team's real situation, and second, the risk of triggering negative, complaining, or unproductive behaviors. With this in mind, we decided to analyze the distribution of feedback and its level of detail, focusing on whether it tends to be more positive or negative.
Steerio pulse check surveys consist of a customized set of statements that each team member assesses on a scale from 0 to 10. (To view the full list of Steerio statements, register on our app here.) Team members also have the option to provide additional feedback by commenting on their responses.
We analyzed the likelihood of comments on positive versus negative grades by examining the grade distribution of 10,000 sampled feedback entries. The results are summarized in the chart below:
What we clearly observe is that people are more likely to provide additional comments on negative assessments than on positive ones. The global distribution (in dark) is noticeably more skewed toward higher grades compared to the distribution of commented feedback (in green). In fact, for grades between 1 and 4, people are nearly twice as likely to comment on their feedback.
The next question regarding feedback comments relates to their quality: do people take the time to explain why they gave a low grade, or do they simply provide a quick and superficial justification? To address this, we used the length of comments as a proxy for their quality. The median and average number of characters per comment are plotted in the chart below:
We clearly see that feedback on low grades tends to have the longest and most detailed comments in terms of character count. People not only provide more feedback on aspects that need improvement within the team, but they also take more time to explain their assessments, highlight areas for improvement, and make proposals on how to enhance teamwork.
Embrace the fact that feedback is an interactive and iterative process.
Every team (like every human being) has its ups and downs. Instead of sticking our heads in the sand, it is highly beneficial to develop a collective awareness and embrace feedback as an opportunity to improve teamwork a little bit each week. In the long run, this approach enables the building of high-performance teams and the establishment of a strong working culture within and across organizations.
