Digest 27. Feedback via digital media: Worse or better than face-to-face?
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The recent pandemic forced most organizations and employees to resort to work-from-home set-ups even when these had never been an option or experimented before. Such experience has dramatically accelerated changes that were already about to happen, and organizations are more and more opting for hybrid work, following what seems to be their employees’ preferences. This means that all interactions, including performance feedback, have essentially turned digital; and makes the question about the optimal medium through which feedback is delivered to employees an even more critical and compelling one. While in “normal” work conditions, managers were encouraged to provide feedback face-to-face, with remote working setting, most feedback must be conveyed via email or applications way more often than in the past. It is understandable that many wonder about the most effective medium in which feedback should be delivered.
What is the impact of feedback delivery medium on employee performance?
To explore the effect of feedback delivery medium on employee performance, Chae and colleagues (2020) conducted an experiment with 120 graduate and undergraduate students from a university in South Korea. The experiment consisted of multiple sessions, and in each participants had to assemble multiple mobile phones, putting their parts together using a computer. At the end of each session, participants were provided with feedback -either face-to-face or via email- from a professor about the number of mobile phones they had assembled correctly. This professor was known to half of the participants as they had class with him. Hence, the professor was considered as someone with authority to half of the participants and as a non-authority figure to the other half. The results showed that the performance of participants who received their feedback via email and those who received it face-to-face did not differ when the feedback was provided by an authority figure. On the other hand, when feedback was offered by a non-authority figure, participants who got their feedback via email had lower performance than those who received it face-to-face. In this latter condition, in fact, the students’ performance was comparable to those who received feedback from an authority figure regardless of the medium.
Infographic created by REAL PAL - Feedback medium and employee performance
Organizational implications
With the greater reliance on hybrid forms of work, we recommend the following to organizations that are concerned with providing feedback to their employees to improve their performance:
Encourage managers and those with authority to provide performance feedback to the employees, instead of peers or those who are considered non-authorities.
Encourage non-authority figures, such as peers, to provide feedback face-to-face and avoid feedback provision via email or any non-personal manner.
Ask managers -who have not established history with recipients- to invest more time and effort in providing face-to-face feedback despite being time-consuming.
The medium used to deliver feedback should not be the only concern, because managers, even in person, need to carefully construct their feedback (see Digest 3 on constructive feedback) and take into consideration individuals’ personality (Digest 7) and their orientation toward feedback (Digest 5).
While the respect for authority figures is common, it might be more the case in cultures with high power-distance. Hence, such recommendations might be more effective in high power-distance cultures (for more culture-related information see Digest 12 and Digest 26).
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Reference: Chae, S., Eagle, L. M., Johnson, D. A., Moon, K., Choi, E., & Oah, S. (2020). The impact of authority relations and feedback delivery method on performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 40(1–2), 140–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/01608061.2020.1746476