Tactical Wordsmithery: How to Alleviate Fear and Anxiety!

Microsoft’s smart way to alleviate performance review fear!

Microsoft recently renamed its feedback system called Feedback Tool to Perspectives in an attempt to ease out employee mental strain associated with performance reviews. The new system is designed with friendly language to foster better manager-associate conversations around performance and development areas.

This is what Kristen Roby Dimlow, the human resources executive in charge of implementing Perspectives had to say about this change:

The system very deliberately does not refer to “feedback,” Behavioral scientists (paywall) have found employees recoil from feedback, and even the word triggers negative impressions.

Even when you hear the word feedback, you can see a brain light up (in an MRI), and you feel a threat response. If you feel threatened, your brain shuts down.

The word Feedback, in the context of performance review, conjure connotations of fear and anxiety. Employees dread to ask for feedback and equally dread to receive one. It is akin to asking feedback from Anton Ego, who would provide scathing feedback on a delicacy if it won’t tantalize his taste buds. I think Microsoft is paving a healthy way to overcome mental stress associated with performance reviews by this approach.

It is also interesting to note that Microsoft smartly played with words — from Feedback to Perspectives. The latter is easily assimilated by our neural network than Feedback, which hijacks and distresses our mind. Brilliant lexical analysis and wordsmithery used here or in other words — great UX Writing employed!

Perhaps, Microsoft may have consulted with their UX Writers for a better term and Perspectives was suggested keeping in mind behavioral psychology toward how a human mind interprets lexicon resources. UX practitioners are Neuroscience and Behavioral psychology experts who understand the human mind and its neural reaction toward content and words.

With the new system in place, the managers simply have to utter these words to the associates and no dread shall befall them:

Hey Linguini, I’d like some fresh, clear, well seasoned perspective!

Linguini would reply:

Sure, which would go nicely with a bottle of Cheval Blanc 1947?

Then the manager and the associate discuss Perspectives with Cheval Blanc 1947 along with a dash of Ratatouille! What a productive, uplifting, and fruitful performance review!

P.S. Did Microsoft derive inspiration from Anton Ego? Food for thought…