Want Better Performance Reviews? Change This One Word

Performance reviews can be time-consuming, costly, and not always useful. But what if changing one word could result in better guidance?

According to research by Harvard Business School Associate Professor Ashley Whillans, requesting “advice” instead of the more common “feedback” can lead to more tangible and practical recommendations in performance reviews. The change seems small, but asking for advice prompts reviewers to focus on future outcomes rather than past actions.

“Our findings demonstrate that employees with a future focus deliver more concrete developmental input, which trained, independent raters evaluate as more actionable and useful,” write Whillans and an international team of researchers from academia and business.

Whillans coauthored the paper “Eliciting Advice Instead of Feedback Improves Developmental Input,” published online by Management Science in July, with Hayley Blunden of American University; Ariella Kristal, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yeshiva University, in New York; and Michael Yeomans, of Imperial College Business School, in London. The team also included researchers Hannah Burd and Georgina Bremner of the UK Behavioural Insights Team, a research consultancy firm, as well as Meta employee Jaewon Yoon.

Why changing one word works

The paper proposes that shifting the focus from the past to the future by asking for advice instead of feedback encourages future-oriented thinking, or prospection. This approach prompts reviewers to consider what they want the employee to improve, and identify the actions needed to achieve it. This helps reduce the burden of generating specific feedback, as the reviewer is already envisioning the desired result and planning specific steps to reach it.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just ask for “specific examples” to get more tangible recommendations? Not necessarily. In the 360-review field experiment, participants responded more concretely to the advice question than to the feedback framing. In a separate study, the response rate decreased when reviewers were asked to provide specific feedback.

“These results suggest that an advice intervention may foster input concreteness without the observed potential drawbacks of directly asking for it,” the paper says.

The team notes that the “advice” framing was most effective for reviews that sought ideas to improve performance, but less so in other situations. For example, comments were not more concrete when reviewers were asked about participants’ strengths.

Requesting “advice” may also not be as effective if the process requires assessing past actions, such as post-mortems. The reviews may not be considered as useful as part of a comprehensive review over a period of time, rather than in relation to a specific task or activity.

Also, the experiments didn’t measure whether the employees adopted the more actionable recommendations or if they, in particular, found them helpful. At the same time, not all cultures might react the same when asked for advice.

Still, the paper demonstrates how a “simple yet powerful intervention” can lead to more practical guidance for professional growth.