The Feedback Gap

And why it matters more now than ever.

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Most managers believe they give more feedback than their team thinks they receive. Research backs this up. Ask a manager how often they give feedback and ask their team the same question, and the answers rarely match. The manager thinks they’re doing it regularly. The team often feels they’re operating largely in the dark.

This gap matters in any circumstances, but there’s a reason it matters more right now.

The Employment Rights Act 2025, which became law in December 2025, will reduce the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from two years to six months, coming into effect in January 2027. At the moment, an employee generally needs two years of service before they can bring an unfair dismissal claim. From 2027, that drops to six months. The compensation cap is being removed at the same time, which means the financial exposure for employers increases significantly.

This isn’t meant to be a legal article, and you should always take proper HR or legal advice for specific situations. But the practical implication for managers is fairly straightforward. The informal window that many organisations relied on — the first couple of years where performance issues could be managed quietly without much formal process — is getting much shorter. Which means that feedback, honest and regular feedback, becomes more important from day one, not something that can be left until a situation becomes difficult.

So why does the gap exist in the first place?

Part of it is that managers often confuse telling someone what to do with giving them feedback. Directing someone, checking in on a project, answering questions — these feel like feedback because there’s a conversation happening. But feedback is specifically about performance. It’s the response to how someone is doing their job, what’s working well, and where there’s room to improve.

Another part is that feedback conversations can feel uncomfortable, particularly when the message isn’t straightforwardly positive. It’s very easy to delay that kind of conversation, to wait for the right moment, or to tell yourself that the person probably already knows. Quite often, they don’t.

And a third factor is that positive feedback gets overlooked. Managers tend to speak up when something isn’t right, but stay quiet when things are going well. The result is that team members go long periods without hearing anything, which they often interpret as indifference rather than satisfaction.

What actually closes the gap?

The most useful shift is making feedback a normal part of how the team operates, rather than something that happens in set-piece moments. A brief observation after a meeting, a quick note when something has gone well, a calm conversation when something hasn’t quite landed right — these don’t need to be formal or time-consuming, but they need to happen consistently.

It also helps to separate feedback from the annual review cycle. If meaningful feedback only surfaces once a year, it will always feel disproportionate, whether it’s positive or critical. Spreading it across the year makes it less loaded and more useful.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s worth checking your own assumptions. If you think someone knows they’re doing well, it might be worth telling them anyway. If you’ve been meaning to raise something, it is usually better to do it sooner and simply than later and formally.

The Employment Rights Act changes don’t require managers to become HR experts or to approach every conversation as though it might end in a tribunal. What they do is make it harder to leave feedback to chance. A team member who has been with you for six months and hasn’t had an honest conversation about how they’re getting on is, from January 2027, in a very different legal position than they are today.

Regular, honest, proportionate feedback has always been good management. It’s just becoming more important to actually do it.

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