'Feedback' Is Now Too Harsh. The New Word is 'Feedforward'

The Wall Street Journal reports that more companies are phasing out "feedback" bosses give to workers - and replacing it with "feedforward." "The idea is that 'feedforward' gives people less anxiety," the Journal's reporter said in a video interview. "It's a little bit gentler. When people hear 'feedback', they think immediately, 'What have I done wrong? What are the bad things my boss is going to tell me to fix?'"And another reason that we're hearing "feedforward" at these companies over and over is employees are younger. Younger employees make up a larger percentage of the workforce today, and a number of experts with whom we spoke said that younger employees are more comfortable with gentler terms like "feedforward"... Q: So they're trying to appeal to the younger employees who are sensitive to harsher reviews, feedback or criticism. But do the employees need to learn how to better receive this type of constructive criticism, regardless of what you call it? A: Some experts say that younger employees do need to be prepared for negative feedback. And just the rebranding or replacing of a word could have a negative effect, and perhaps managers won't be as comfortable providing negative feedback if they're just thinking about this as a way to tell an employee what they've done well... Certain companies are really revamping their entire review process, trying to make it so that employees and managers are more communicative and really addressing any issues or concerns, so that they can work more productively. In some cases if companies are just rebranding "feedback" with "feedforward" or other terms, people with whom I spoke were concerned that this is just a hollow effort. And there is a possibility that younger generations won't learn about what they're doing wrong and how to improve... [W]e did speak with an expert who said that baby boomers learned to suck it up and perform. And this trend really is generational. From the Journal's article: At Microsoft, managers are encouraged to use the word "perspectives" instead of traditional feedback, according to current and former employees. Reviews, meanwhile, have been branded as "connect" conversations. The company also recently stopped including anonymous comments from peers in employee reviews, instead showing the names of the colleagues in question... Jennifer Solomon-Baum, a former Microsoft marketing director who left early this year, says she understands why the company chose to rethink its approach to feedback, which she feels may have made employees more open to giving feedback. On the other hand, she says Microsoft's recent decision to put an end to anonymous peer feedback in reviews completely backfired. In the wake of the change, "we didn't get the richness of constructive criticism," says Solomon-Baum, who is now consulting and leading marketing for a new ballet company in Los Angeles. "It became a praise festival...." The divide on the issue is partially generational, several HR specialists say... Many younger employees entered the workforce while managers had loosened expectations on productivity and performance, and may have had less stringent grading in college amid remote classes, making the postpandemic adjustment more difficult. "It's the first time that they have not just gotten professional feedback, but it might be the first time in quite a while that somebody said, 'You know, this isn't good enough,'" says Megan Gerhardt, a management professor at Miami University and the author of a book on leading intergenerational workforces. "I refuse to believe this is true," writes Apple blogger John Gruber, "and if it is true, my feedback is that any company that encounters an employee who bristles at the word feedback should fire them on the spot."

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