The Majority of People Praise Their Co-workers, Even When They Don't Have To

Maybe people are basically good after all. Impraise is a Dutch startup that built an app for collecting feedback on co-workers. It’s used by companies like Atlassian, Ogilvy and Elsevier, with about 90% of that feedback generated anonymously.

While the feedback sent within the Impraise app is anonymous, senders are asked to rate how positive the feedback they sent was. On a scale from one to 10, for example, feedback rated 10 would mean the sender just sent extremely positive feedback to a co-worker.

We asked Impraise to analyze what sort of feedback people gave their co-workers. The company pulled 230,000 instances of feedback from the last 18 months. Impraise improbably found that nearly 92% of feedback was positive. Feedback is considered positive when it’s rated six or better on a normalized 10-point scale (each Impraise customer can modify the scale, so it’s not always 10 points).

Bas Kohnke, Impraise’s chief executive and co-founder, says the majority of its customers are based in the US, UK or the Netherlands. Most customers using Impraise ask for feedback once every two weeks, he said. The results from Impraise are also somewhat skewed in favor of younger tech companies, which Kohnke says make up the majority of its customers.

Impraise wants to create a “feedback culture” for its customers, Kohnke says. “People are often not comfortable giving feedback,” he says. “That’s where anonymity comes into play,” he says. Impraise may be providing human resources departments with a much needed solution.Gallup has found that nearly 70% of American workers don’t feel engaged at work. That’s contributing to employees quitting because of ineffective or infrequent communication.