Nudge · 2-minute read
Annual surveys measure memory, not experience. Two questions asked weekly reveal far more than sixty asked once a year.
Experience-sampling research shows that how people feel in the moment differs from how they remember feeling. Annual surveys are dominated by whatever happened recently.
A short, frequent check feels like a pulse rather than an audit, so people actually answer it — and the data is close enough to events to act on.
The research: Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1987), Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease — experience sampling.
Adapted from Nudges at Work by Tareef Jafferi, shared in partnership with Happily.ai.
Feedback makes performance worse surprisingly often. Whether it was positive or negative barely matters — what matters is whether it points attention at the work or at the person.
Copying the boss “just in case” looks like transparency. It’s really a symptom of fear — and leaders can cure it one reply at a time.
One sentence attached to critical feedback dramatically increased how many people acted on it — especially those who trusted the giver least.