Case Background

The case study revolves around Nisha and Ben who were friends and employees of Ness
Company. Ness Company is a gaming company that focuses on video games. Both Nisha and
Ben were friends for a long time. They do not typically work together but they will for Ness’s
hottest game Sokontia. They knew each other since the beginning, and they often trade notes and
help each other with their workloads at Ness. Nisha’s initial reaction was happy when she was
tasked to work with Ben alongside her colleague Mark on this new project.

In the process of doing the said projects, there seems to be a problem with Ben’s performance in
regard to a team effort. Some of these are being late for meetings, not paying attention, coming
to meetings unprepared, not meeting deadlines, and having no sense of urgency. His reason for
lacking is that he was also working on another project, and they were understaffed. It starts to
bother Nisha and Mark because the management has high expectations of them, and their output,
and they cannot afford to fail them just because of Ben. Nisha starts thinking of using the
feedback tool to rate Ben 0 and Mark 5 when the former begins to social loaf. But then Nisha
feels bad for giving Ben a bad rating because he was his friend and doing so will tarnish their
friendship and their co-worker relationship.

Ness Company was big on using peer feedback as a tool for evaluation that aims at getting
employees honest and direct with each other. The said company has two peer feedback, first is
difficult-conversation training which is a planned discussion about an uncomfortable topic or a
negative experience where the goal is to share different perspectives, build mutual
understanding, and develop respect, and the second peer feedback tool is an application that
allows employees to send ratings and short snippets of feedback to teammates performance.

Now the question is what rating should Nisha give Ben, and what should she tell him?