Olivia Owens is the creator and General Manager of IFundWomen of Color, the crowdfunding, grants, coaching, and connections platform built to close the funding gap for women of color entrepreneurs. Before founding IFundWomen of Color, she was a founding team member at IFundWomen, where she ran business development and partnerships with brands like Unilever, Visa, and adidas, and built one of the country's largest connected communities of women business owners. Her earlier career at Under Armour was inside People and Culture, which is where her thinking on feedback first took shape.
On Reimagining Company Culture, Olivia talked with host Lindsay Tjepkema about a topic that managers say they value and almost universally do badly: constructive feedback. Her angle is unusual because she has lived on both sides of it, as an HR practitioner who coached managers through hard conversations and as a founder who has had to give and receive feedback in environments where the stakes are existential.
Why Most Workplace Feedback Quietly Fails
Feedback is one of the most studied management practices and one of the most poorly executed. Gallup found that 80 percent of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged at work, yet only a small minority of employees report ever receiving that kind of feedback. The gap is not motivation. Most managers know feedback matters. The gap is design: feedback is treated as a once-a-year event tied to a rating, instead of a weekly habit tied to specific behaviors.
Olivia's working theory is that the word "feedback" is doing too much work. It covers everything from "your slide deck has typos" to "your communication style is hurting the team," and most managers have not learned to handle those as separate skills. The first is a thirty-second correction. The second is a planned conversation that takes preparation, context, and follow-up. Treating them the same is why most employee feedback fails to land.
What Constructive Feedback Actually Requires
How is constructive feedback different from criticism?
Criticism describes a problem. Constructive feedback describes a problem, points to a specific behavior the recipient can change, and ties that change to an outcome the recipient cares about. HBR's research on meaningful feedback is blunt about this: criticism that attacks character rather than behavior suppresses learning, drives turnover, and quietly trains employees to hide problems instead of surface them.
How often should managers give feedback?
Far more often than they do. Gallup's data points to a few short interactions per week as the threshold where feedback starts to predict engagement. Olivia's preferred cadence is a weekly fifteen-minute one-on-one focused on two questions: what worked this week, and what is one thing you want to be doing differently next week. That structure is short enough that managers actually do it and specific enough that the conversation does not drift into generic praise.
What Actually Works
Separate feedback from the performance review
Performance reviews are evaluative. Feedback is developmental. When the two collapse into a single annual conversation, employees experience every piece of feedback as a verdict, and managers stop giving the small course-corrections that would have made the verdict unnecessary. Olivia's recommendation is simple: hold the performance review twice a year, and run feedback as its own weekly habit so the review contains zero surprises.
Make the ask, not the assessment, the opening line
Olivia opens hard conversations with a request rather than a judgment: "Can I share something I noticed?" That single phrase moves the recipient from defense to curiosity, because they get to say yes before they hear the content. It also signals that the manager has thought about timing, which is most of the battle. Feedback delivered when the recipient is exhausted, distracted, or already in the middle of fixing the problem rarely works regardless of how well it was phrased.
Build feedback loops that go both directions
The fastest way to make a team comfortable receiving feedback is for managers to ask for it first, in public, and act on it visibly. Olivia uses 360-style input from her direct reports every quarter, then closes the loop with a short note on what she heard and what she is changing. 360 surveys work well for this when they are run as a habit rather than a once-a-year compliance exercise. AllVoices' employee survey tool is built around the same idea: short, frequent, two-way listening rather than annual marathons.
Where Employee Relations Fits Into the Feedback Stack
A surprising amount of employee relations work is downstream of feedback that did not happen. A manager avoids a hard conversation for six months, the underlying behavior gets worse, the employee is eventually placed on a performance improvement plan, and the resulting case lands on an HRBP's desk with very little written record of what was said when. The fix is not a heavier process at the back end, it is better tooling at the front end.
Why ER teams should care about feedback hygiene
If your ER team is fielding a steady stream of "my manager never told me this was a problem" cases, the upstream issue is usually that feedback is happening verbally, sporadically, and without documentation. AllVoices' HR case management system gives ER teams a way to spot the pattern (which managers, which teams, which behaviors keep showing up) and route the right managers to coaching before the next case lands. Informal communication still matters, but it has to leave a trail.
Frequently Asked Questions About Constructive Feedback
What is constructive feedback in the workplace?
Constructive feedback is information shared with an employee about a specific behavior, framed in a way that gives them a clear path to change it. The defining features are specificity (what exactly happened), behavior focus (not character), timeliness (close to the event), and a forward-looking ask.
How do I give constructive feedback to a defensive employee?
Slow down, ask permission to share what you noticed, name one specific behavior, and ask how the employee sees it. Defensiveness is almost always a response to feeling judged on identity rather than behavior, so the more concrete and forward-looking the conversation, the less defensive the response.
Should constructive feedback be private or public?
Private, almost always. Public feedback (even when it is intended as praise) can backfire because it shifts attention from the behavior to the social dynamics in the room. Reserve public moments for recognition of completed work, and keep developmental feedback in one-on-ones.
How do I receive constructive feedback well?
Listen all the way through before responding, ask one clarifying question, and thank the giver before you decide whether you agree. The instinct to defend in real time is what trains people to stop giving you feedback. You can always come back the next day with a more considered response.
What is the link between feedback and retention?
Strong. Employees who feel they are getting useful feedback report higher engagement, faster skill growth, and lower intent to leave. Conversely, the absence of feedback is one of the most reliable predictors of voluntary turnover, because employees who do not know how they are doing tend to assume the worst.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Olivia's frame is that constructive feedback is a culture problem disguised as a manager skills problem. You can train managers all day, but if the company's feedback infrastructure (cadence, tooling, expectations, accountability) only kicks in once a year at review time, managers will mirror that cadence. The work is to build the smaller habits: weekly one-on-ones with a real structure, quarterly upward feedback that gets responded to, and a way to spot the patterns when feedback is going sideways.
For HR leaders, the highest-return change is usually the simplest. Pick one cadence (weekly fifteen-minute one-on-ones is a good default), give managers a one-page guide for running them, and audit a quarter later whether they actually happened. Most feedback initiatives fail not because the content was wrong but because nobody was checking whether the conversations were happening at all.
If you want to see how AllVoices supports the listening, case management, and reporting infrastructure behind a real feedback culture, talk to our team about a tailored walkthrough.
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