Manager feedback is the specific, regular information a line manager gives someone about their work, measured against an agreed bar, so that a performance review confirms what has already been said rather than announcing it. If your managers lack the time or the skills to give it during the year, the fix belongs before the review cycle opens, not in the calibration meeting afterwards. The guide to manager training for performance conversations covers how to practise this.
This article is for People and HR leaders, CPOs and Heads of People at UK and Irish companies of 100 to 1,500 staff who are about to launch year-end reviews. The latest UK data is a useful warning: in the CIPD Good Work Index 2025, only 59% of managers said they have the time to manage people well.
Key takeaways
- The CIPD Good Work Index 2025 found that 62% of UK employees say their line manager provides helpful feedback, up from 56% in 2023.
- Only 60% of managers in the same 2025 survey said they had the training and information, and 59% the time, to manage people well.
- The CIPD estimates that about 10 million UK employees do not believe they get useful feedback from their manager or that their manager helps improve their performance.
- Review quality is decided weeks before launch, by how much time managers have, how clear the bar is and whether evidence exists to write from.
- Start by pricing what your current cycle costs managers in hours, then decide what to remove before you ask them for better feedback.
What manager feedback is, and what it is not
Three things get blurred together at review time, and the blur is where most of the frustration comes from.
- Feedback is frequent and specific: what happened, what good looks like for this person's level, and what to try next.
- An appraisal or review is a periodic decision that turns months of evidence into a rating and a development plan.
- A rating is the label at the end. It should be the least surprising part of the process.
Manager feedback is not a comment on personality, a list of everything that went wrong in December, or an annual event. If the first honest conversation of the year happens inside the review, the review is carrying a load it was never designed for. Our guide to feedback that sticks covers the weekly habits behind this.
What the CIPD 2025 data says about UK managers
The CIPD Good Work Index 2025, written by Jake Young and Derek Tong and published in June 2025, is the eighth wave of the CIPD's UK Working Lives survey. YouGov collected responses from 5,017 UK employees in January and February 2025, weighted to ONS population figures. The line manager questions show real progress since 2023, and a gap that still matters for anyone about to run reviews.
| What employees or managers said | CIPD 2025 figure | What it means for your review cycle | What to do before launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| My line manager provides helpful feedback | 62% agree (56% in 2023) | Around four in ten people may reach their review without useful feedback to point to | Ask for monthly evidence notes, starting now |
| My line manager helps me perform well in my job | 63% agree (58% in 2023) | The review risks judging people who were never coached against the bar | Share the scorecard and level expectations before self-reviews open |
| Managers: I have the training and information to manage people well | 60% (52% in 2023) | Four in ten managers may be writing reviews they were not prepared for | Run a short briefing on the review form itself |
| Managers: I have the time to manage people well | 59% (52% in 2023) | Review season lands on managers who already feel short of time | Cut or pre-fill review steps before adding new ones |
| Achieve job objectives, by whether the manager helps them perform well | 93% if they agree, 77% if they disagree | Manager quality is tied to how people rate their own delivery | Check manager-level patterns in calibration |
The report also estimates that about 10 million UK employees do not believe they receive useful feedback from their manager or that their manager helps improve their performance. Honest caveats: this is self-reported survey data from UK employees only, so Ireland is not covered, and the links between manager behaviour and achieving objectives are associations, not proof of cause.
Two other sources point the same way. The Office for National Statistics' 2024 bulletin on management practices in the UK found the average management practice score rose to 0.55 in 2023, with firms of 100 to 249 employees averaging 0.65 and those with more than 250 averaging 0.68; the use of key performance indicators scored lowest of the four areas at 0.42. And the CIPD's 2023 evidence review on effective people managers by Amy Bosley and Jonny Gifford recommends that managers spend no more than 30% of their time on non-managerial work, and finds that training in general management skills, such as goal-setting and performance appraisal, transfers best to how leaders behave.
6 fixes for manager feedback before reviews open
1. Price the manager hours your cycle already takes
Before asking for better feedback, work out what the current process costs each manager in self-review reading, form filling and meetings. Run your numbers through the performance review cost calculator. Why: with only 59% of managers saying they have the time to manage people well, adding effort without removing any tends to produce shorter, vaguer reviews.
2. Publish the bar each person is reviewed against
Give every manager the same written definitions for each rating, with example behaviours by level, and share them with employees before self-reviews open. Our explainer on performance rating scales has a five-level set you can adapt. Why: feedback is only useful when both people know what good looks like.
3. Make one evidence note a month the minimum
Ask managers to log one short note per person per month against the scorecard, written straight after a 1:1. Why: a manager with eight to twelve notes writes from the record; a manager with none writes from the last six weeks.
4. Train on the review, not on leadership in general
Run a 45-minute session that walks through your actual form, two anonymised examples and how to deliver a difficult message. Hand out the manager review prep checklist at the end. Why: the CIPD's 2023 evidence review found general management skills such as performance appraisal transfer best to behaviour, and it also notes that effective training is repeated rather than run once.
5. Pre-fill what the system already knows
Goals, previous ratings, 1:1 notes and peer input should appear in the review automatically, not be copied in by hand. Our piece on adding review cycles without extra admin shows where the hours go. Why: every minute spent copying is a minute not spent thinking about the person.
6. Calibrate the evidence, not only the grades
In calibration, ask each manager to point to the notes behind their outliers and look for teams where evidence is thin across the board. Follow the calibration meeting running order and add an evidence check to it. Why: it shows which managers need support, not only which ratings need moving.
Risks to manage, and what stays human
- Notes become box-ticking. Safeguard: ask for one specific example per note and spot-check a sample each month.
- Managers short of time copy last year's wording. Safeguard: remove a review step for every new request you make of them.
- Feedback drifts into personality. Safeguard: tie every comment to a goal, a skill or a value on the scorecard.
- Calibration punishes honest managers. Safeguard: treat well-evidenced low ratings as good practice, and challenge unevidenced high ones just as hard.
- The difficult conversation gets automated away. Safeguard: the rating and the development message are always delivered by the manager, in person or on video.
How to tell whether manager feedback is improving
These signals are playbook guidance, not research findings. Track them for one cycle and compare.
- The share of people with at least three dated evidence notes before self-reviews open.
- Reviews submitted on time, by manager, without HR chasing.
- How many ratings move in calibration because evidence was missing.
- A pulse question that mirrors the CIPD's: "My manager provides helpful feedback."
- Formal appeals or "this came as a surprise" comments after feedback conversations.
If manager engagement is part of the problem, our summary of what Gallup found about manager engagement is worth reading alongside these signals: Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2025 reported that global manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% in 2024.
Our perspective
When a People leader tells me their managers write poor reviews, I ask how many hours the cycle takes each manager and who has ever counted. Usually nobody has. My view is that most weak feedback is a design problem before it is a skills problem: we ask managers to rebuild a year of evidence from memory in a fortnight, then blame them for vague wording. Give them the bar, the notes and the time, and most of them write a decent review. Coaching matters, but it works far better once the admin stops eating the hours it needs.
Ash
Where Revolut People fits, and where it doesn't
The part of this problem software can help with is the admin that crowds out real feedback. In Revolut People, the review scorecard pulls in each person's goals and earlier cycle results, so managers start from evidence rather than a blank form; the page for line managers explains how pre-filled scorecards reduce prep. 1:1s come with AI-powered summaries, which makes a monthly evidence note a by-product of a meeting that already happens. Calibration dashboards flag patterns such as manager leniency and grade inflation; Ebury cut departmental calibration from 4 hours to 1 hour once grading moved out of separate spreadsheets.
The limit is real: no platform gives a manager more time or teaches them to deliver a hard message well. That still depends on workload choices and training. If you want to check whether this setup suits your company, book a 15-minute discovery call. Bring your current review form, with names removed, and you will leave with specific fixes whether or not Revolut People is the right fit.
A six-week sequence for the next review cycle
Work back from the day reviews open. The review go-live planner will turn this into dates for your calendar, and the HR manager's review checklist covers sign-off and close-out.
| When | What happens | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 6 weeks before launch | Count manager hours per review; remove or pre-fill one step | People team |
| 5 weeks before | Publish rating definitions and level expectations to everyone | People team with department heads |
| 4 weeks before | Managers log a first evidence note per person in their next 1:1 | Line managers |
| 2 weeks before | 45-minute briefing on the review form with two worked examples | People partner |
| Launch week | Self-reviews open; managers write from their notes | Employees and managers |
| Calibration week | Check evidence behind outliers and flag teams with thin notes | People team and senior leaders |
| 2 weeks after | Feedback conversations done; pulse question sent | Line managers, then People team |
Bottom line
UK line managers are getting better at feedback: the CIPD Good Work Index 2025 shows 62% of employees now rate it as helpful, against 56% two years earlier. Yet around four in ten managers do not say they have the time or the training to manage people well, and that gap shows up in every year-end review. Fix the inputs first: the time a cycle takes, a published bar and monthly evidence. Then the review can be about the person instead of the paperwork.
FAQ
What did the CIPD Good Work Index 2025 find about line managers?
The CIPD Good Work Index 2025, based on a YouGov survey of 5,017 UK employees in January and February 2025, found that 62% say their line manager provides helpful feedback, up from 56% in 2023, and 63% say their manager helps them perform well. Among managers, 60% said they had the training and information, and 59% the time, to manage people well.
What is the difference between manager feedback and a performance review?
Feedback is the running commentary: specific, frequent notes on what someone did and how it compares with the bar for their level. A performance review is the periodic decision that summarises that evidence into a rating, a development plan and sometimes a pay or promotion outcome. When feedback is missing, the review has to do both jobs at once, and it usually does neither well.
How often should managers give feedback before a year-end review?
Playbook guidance, not a research finding: at least one documented performance conversation a month, usually inside an existing 1:1, with a short written note against the scorecard. That gives a manager eight to twelve pieces of evidence by year end, enough to write a review without relying on memory, and it means nothing in the final conversation comes as a surprise.
Does better line management actually improve performance?
The evidence points that way but is mostly correlational. In the CIPD Good Work Index 2025, 93% of employees who agree their manager helps them perform well say they achieve their job objectives, against 77% of those who disagree. ONS analysis published in 2024 links stronger management practices with higher productivity, and the CIPD's 2023 evidence review finds people managers influence team performance and turnover.
Can performance management software fix poor manager feedback?
Not on its own. Software can make the right behaviour easier: goals and earlier notes pre-filled into the review, prompts in 1:1s and calibration views that show where evidence is thin. It cannot give a manager more hours in the week or the confidence to say something difficult. Those come from workload decisions, training and senior leaders who treat people management as real work.
Sources
- CIPD: Good Work Index 2025, survey report by Jake Young and Derek Tong (2025)
- Office for National Statistics: Management practices in the UK, 2016 to 2023 (2024)
- CIPD: Effective people managers, an evidence review, practice summary by Amy Bosley and Jonny Gifford (2023)
- Gallup: State of the Global Workplace 2025, summarised in "Global Engagement Falls for the Second Time Since 2009" (2025)