New Study Finds 1 Feedback Mistake Prompts 14 Percent of Staff to Quit—and Boomer Managers Are the Most Likely to Make It

New Adobe data reveals the feedback blunders causing Sunday Scaries and driving of workers to quit.

BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

Giving feedback to your workforce and colleagues may seem like such a natural part of business that you barely give it any thought: “Hey Steve, this financial report is almost there, but you need to shorten the introduction.” When getting work done in a team, you absolutely need to have several different types of feedback discussion. 

But a new report from digital giant Adobe says that people are so worried about how colleagues will react that they’re delaying having feedback chats. And younger workers feel very differently about the whole process. The data may influence how you discuss progress with your teams, and even impact how you train your staff.

Adobe’s data has very clear implications: feedback anxiety is widespread, workers know feedback has value and its absence will slow down work, and poor quality feedback can cripple the whole workplace experience.

Fully 38 percent of workers among the 1,000 full-time staff Adobe surveyed said they’d purposely delayed delivering “necessary feedback because they are concerned about the recipient’s reaction.”

How Canva Became the Power Player in the AI Design Wars

Worse, nearly three in five workers said their work had been “regularly slowed down” thanks to “receiving contradictory or conflicting feedback from multiple sources on the same projects.” Low quality feedback is a cause of burnout for 43 percent of the workers surveyed, and it’s been such a factor that 14 percent of people said it had prompted them to look for new jobs. 

The survey also found that different generations have very different feelings about giving and receiving feedback.

Gen-Z workers, for example, were 100 percent more likely than the average worker to say that “poor quality feedback has worsened their imposter syndrome.” Some four in ten of this age cohort also said that they’d felt the dreaded “Sunday Scaries” or anxiety ahead of a week of work because they were worried about friction from upcoming feedback.

© Inc.com