According to a research run by Impraise, managers are more focused on getting feedback on productivity skills rather than interpersonal skills such as listening.

The ability to ask for feedback in real-time revealed some interesting facts about the skills that managers care most about. Managers that work with this new type of performance management, real-time 360 degree feedback, show little interest in improving their listening skills although employees see it as most relevant topic.

The research “Global analysis: how real-time feedback affects work performance and employee engagement” run by Impraise, a web based and mobile solution for timely, actionable feedback at work was based on 106 managers and 201 employees that asked for feedback 2639 times in the last 8 months. With 32,978 feedback interactions analyzed, results turned out to be more surprising than expected.

Managers seem to be more focused on their productivity skills, having asked for feedback about it 42% more than employees. They also ask for feedback about their presentation skills 85% more than employees. But when it comes to listening skills managers don’t seem to be that concerned, asking 55% less than employees about this skill although it’s frequently seen as one of the most important management behaviors. See detailed results here.

“Since we launched Impraise we’ve seen hundreds of managers changing their way of communicating according to the real-time feedback they sought from their team. In the case of Booking.com, managers developed a strong sense of listening to their people during 1-on-1s resulting in a significant increase of employee engagement.” Steffen Maier, Co-founder of Impraise.

Employees on the other hand, are more likely to ask for feedback on interpersonal skills such as meetings, leadership or communication, but less probably to ask for feedback on their productivity. However, in general managers ask 2.2 times more feedback than employees.  

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