As we head into end- of- year performance reviews, I’m seeing the same pattern across a number of organisations: a rise in grievances and complaints tied to performance management and reasonable management action.
The common thread is rarely the review itself – it’s the feedback that didn’t happen in the months before it. So, I wrote down why that happens, and what separates feedback that protects you from feedback that quietly exposes you.
1 in 5 employees get weekly feedback – while around half of managers believe they give it often. Gallup, 2024
66% would likely leave a manager who didn’t make them feel appreciated. Robert Half, 2017
80% report being fully engaged when feedback is meaningful – regardless of days in the office. Gallup, 2023
Feedback: why is it
We all know feedback matters. As managers, we want to support our teams, coach them, and help them do their best – so why is it so hard?
A lot of it comes down to discomfort. Managers avoid difficult or hard to hear feedback because they’re worried it’ll strain the relationship, upset the team dynamic, or force them to face a defensive reaction. So they put it off. They sugar-coat it until it means nothing. Or store it up and drop it all at once during the end-of-year performance discussions – which is not the time to raise an issue for the first time, though that’s usually exactly when it happens, and it goes horribly wrong.
Avoidance is a poor reason to leave someone in the dark about their own performance, especially when you can see they’re struggling and let it continue.
The trouble is that vague or absent feedback isn’t neutral. It doesn’t quietly wait in the background for a better time. It creates its own problems, and those problems show up in three places any organisation should care about: whether people stay, whether they perform, and whether you’re exposed when something goes wrong.
Impacts
Let’s look at retention. People don’t leave because they were told the truth. They leave because they were left guessing. “You need to improve your communication” gives someone nothing to act on. Improve it how? Which part? What does good even look like? “Great work lately,” with no detail attached, feels hollow and a little patronising. When feedback has no direction, people fill the gap with anxiety – and anxious people start looking elsewhere. Under the Victorian OHS Regulations, that ambiguity even has a name. Low role clarity is a recognised psychosocial hazard, which means leaving people unclear about what’s expected of them isn’t just weak management. It’s a workplace hazard.
Feedback delivered weeks or months after the event has lost its context and, more than likely, its usefulness. The behaviour has been repeated over and over, and the window to correct it has closed. By the time something of meaning reaches the employee, it feels less like coaching and more like a reckoning – and people respond to a reckoning by protecting themselves rather than improving. Grievances, formal complaints, and conversations about how “unfair” it all is start circulating across the team and the wider organisation. Reputations are damaged on both sides, productivity slips, team dynamics strain and sometimes turn toxic, and other teams become less willing to engage with the discomfort.
Timely, specific, actionable feedback, delivered intentionally and with empathy, catches the behaviour while it still matters and gives the person a real chance to adjust. Recognising when someone is improving matters just as much: it shows care, acknowledges effort, and builds a culture of continuous improvement rather than protection, deflection, and grievance.
The legal side
The Fair Work Commission treats fair, actionable performance feedback as reasonable management action. Done properly and transparently, it isn’t bullying and it isn’t adverse action. But that protection only holds if the feedback was meaningful and delivered in a way the person could act on. The Commission looks at how feedback was given. Was it intermittent, undocumented, tangled up with conduct issues? Or sprung on someone for the first time in the meeting where they’re being exited? The Commission’s question isn’t “did you give feedback.” It’s whether the person had a genuine, informed opportunity to improve. If the message was unclear, delayed, or only arrived at the pointy end of a performance management process, the answer is no – and the organisation wears the consequences.
Useful feedback vs risky noise
Good feedback is specific to something you actually observed. Not “you’re not a team player,” but a clear account of what happened, why it mattered, and what you’d like to see instead. It’s timely, delivered close to the occurrence rather than banked for the monthly catch- up. It comes with a path forward, so the person leaves with something to do rather than just a verdict to absorb. It invites a response, because asking “what’s your read on this?” often surfaces context that changes the picture entirely. And it’s applied consistently, because few things erode trust faster than one person getting detailed coaching while another gets vague positivity or silence.
Feedback is hard because doing it well asks more of a manager than doing it badly. It asks for honesty, good timing, specificity, and the willingness to sit through an uncomfortable conversation. But the alternative isn’t “no feedback.” The alternative is confusion, disengagement, turnover, legal exposure, and WHS risk. The question for organisations right now is straightforward: are your managers creating risky noise, or driving the kind of feedback that keeps good people and lifts performance?
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