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Performance
7
min read
Most organizations today are in the midst of adopting a continuous feedback approach to improve employee performance and organizational success. If you have joined this bandwagon, you would have several questions in your mind around the same. Questions around the best practices, the common pitfalls, duration and frequency and much more.
To help you leverage the continuous feedback framework, we have compiled a list of all the questions you might have along with answers from industry experts.
#Q1. What is the frequency and duration of reviews for continuous feedback?
When it comes to continuous feedback, the idea is to make the reviews short and regular. Instead of making it a long drawn annual process, try to offer reviews which are frequent and to the point. The reviews can be as frequent as daily or weekly or monthly.
PRO-TIP — Under continuous feedback, instead of focusing on a pre-decided timeline and frequency for reviews, go for an approach where you give your employees review and feedback when the need arises.
For instance, if you have inputs or suggestions on the way a particular task has been completed, share it with your team members in real time instead of waiting for the review cycle to commence.
Also, keep your reviews and suggestions concise and don’t elongate them just for the sake of it. Set the context and share your inputs. Therefore, when continuous feedback is concerned, the best frequency is to offer feedback in real time and keep it crisp and action oriented.
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#Q2. What are the best practices to ensure effectiveness of continuous feedback?
If you are part of a fast growing organization, you need to ensure that you adopt an effective and evidence-based approach to continuous feedback. Providing reviews and feedback to your employees in real time can be a great starting point. However, it is not enough to create a culture where continuous feedback contributes to continuous performance improvement.
Here are the top best practices you can leverage to augment the effectiveness of your continuous feedback focus:
1. Track progress regularly
Continuous feedback will only lead to better performance when you have a clear picture of the employee's progress. If you don’t know where your employee stands and in which direction they are moving, you will not have anything concrete to share in your frequent conversations. Therefore, it is important to constantly track the progress of your employees and provide them with appropriate timely feedback.
2. Encourage dialogue
Your continuous feedback will only be effective if you promote and encourage dialogue. Simply sharing your inputs and feedback on a regular basis with your employees will not suffice. Rather, you need to encourage your employees to share their side of the story as well as voice challenges and provide feedback to you as well. This way, continuous feedback will ensure that a culture of improvement comes to the forefront.
3. Gauge employee pulse
To make continuous feedback effective, you need to have insights and intel on employee perceptions and opinions in real time. This will help you to preempt risks and address challenges in real time by providing appropriate feedback and support. You can do so by conducting employee pulse surveys which can go out on a daily basis. This employee pulse can help you lay the foundation of actions of your managers with empowering feedback.
QUICK READ — Check out these articles to learn how to make the most of your employee pulse surveys —
4. Leverage technology
Finally, one of the key aspects to augment the effectiveness of continuous feedback is to ensure consistency and continuity. As a fast growing organization, you might be swamped with a lot of other priorities and continuous feedback might take a back seat.
Here, leveraging a platform like SuperBeings which can automate capturing employee pulse, sharing key insights and providing next steps for managers and guided templates for conversations can help maintain the momentum. Therefore, you must consider leveraging the right tools and resources to stay on track.
Get a hands on experience on how SuperBeings can drive continuous feedback in your organization, book a free demo today.
#Q3. How can fast growing organizations embed ongoing feedback in their flow of work?
As mentioned above also, to make continuous feedback effective, you need to have a consistent approach. One of the best ways to achieve the same is by embedding continuous feedback in the very culture of the organization. The idea is to see it as a part of the flow of work, rather than an added responsibility.
Here are a few ways to embed ongoing feedback into flow of work:
1. Focus on constructive conversations
To begin with, you need to focus on conducting constructive conversations regularly. When it comes to continuous feedback, it is not always about sharing with your employees where they can improve. It is equally about sharing some insights with them and learning from them how they feel and how work is going, what are the challenges they face etc.
Therefore, if you focus your efforts towards ensuring regular constructive conversations as a part of your workday, feedback continuity will be taken care of. Here you can also focus on creating a culture where 1:1 conversations are a norm.
Use a tool like SuperBeings to provide your managers with AI driven 1:1 meeting recommendations, conflict free time slots for 1:1 meetings whenever they need and guided templates for all crucial conversations.
2. Build a cadence
It is important that you set a cadence with all your team members. It could be weekly, fortnightly or monthly, depending on the role and responsibilities and the relationship you share with them.
While you must offer feedback in real time, this cadence will become a part of your schedule to ensure that even when there is no apparent review to offer, you do connect with your employees on a regular basis, without it becoming an added burden.
When it is there in your calendar, it will be a part of your tasks for the day, and will not require any extra effort. SuperBeings integrates with your favorite calendar based on your feedback needs and helps you find conflict-free meeting slots with any one or more of your team members.
3. Make feedback a core value
Next, you must focus on making feedback a core value for your organization. You would agree that for most organizations, there are certain values which are very important and can be seen being practiced by almost every employee. You need to make feedback one of the values.
If you are able to do so, continuous feedback will come as second nature to everyone in the team and will become part of the day to day expectations, rather than an added one.
#Q4. Performance Reviews vs. Continuous Feedback: How to keep them separate?
If you are moving towards a continuous feedback approach, you might gradually realize that your regular ongoing reviews are replacing your performance reviews. There is often this challenge that most organizations face.
However, it is extremely important to keep the two as distinct because while the former focuses on real time challenges and concerns, it does not offer a holistic picture of the employee’s performance and will not be enough to assign appraisals, long term rewards and career planning.
Fortunately, there are a few ways in which the distinction between the two can be maintained and you can prevent continuous reviews from engulfing performance reviews:
1. Set dates for annual/bi-annual performance reviews in advance
The first step to avoid this is by not doing away with annual or bi-annual performance reviews and communicating the dates or the timeline for the same in advance. This will give out the message that while ongoing reviews are important, you are equally committed to performance reviews in the long run.
2. Emphasize on the difference and importance of each
Second, it is important to emphasize the difference between the two and highlight the importance of each. You need to make your team members understand that while ongoing reviews seek to address challenges in real time and preempt any major risk, performance reviews seek to focus on long term performance improvement and gauge the impact of employee performance on organizational success and vice versa.
Ongoing reviews have a more short term and immediate focus and seek to ensure everyday work efficiency. Performance reviews set the tone for long term performance improvement and have a more pronounced focus. It is extremely critical to communicate this to your managers and executives, who are then responsible for ensuring that the same reaches their team members.
3. Have distinct parameters for evaluation
If you wish to prevent ongoing reviews from taking place of performance reviews, you need to have distinct parameters for evaluation of both. If you have similar parameters, your managers will have a hard time differentiating between the two and the whole purpose will be defeated.
Therefore, your ongoing reviews must focus on metrics of task and project completion, while the performance reviews should include parameters like organizational impact, personal and professional growth, etc.
4. Identify different forms of continuous feedback
Another way to prevent continuous feedback from taking place of performance reviews is to expand the scope of what continuous feedback entails. The idea is to broaden the idea beyond performance and goal setting to include different factors that influence employee experience.
Your continuous feedback could focus on augmenting engagement and talking about creating an empowering culture.
While your performance review will solely focus on the employee and how his/her contribution has been to organizational success, continuous feedback can take care of several other factors which enable employee growth and development.
#Q5. How to align continuous feedback with rewards decisions?
There are several ways in which continuous feedback can ensure that rewards and recognition happen in the most effective and meaningful manner. Following are a few aspects that you need to keep in mind —
1. Eliminate bias from recognition
In the first instance, if you look at annual performance feedback, you might see that it is vulnerable to various forms of biases which come along when feedback is delivered after long intervals. Two of the most common biases include halo or horns effect and recency effect.
a) Halo or Horns Effect
In halo or horns effect, your judgment of an individual’s performance might be clouded by a singular positive or negative event. Here you will end up seeing their entire performance with a tinted lens.
However, when you leverage continuous feedback, you are able to leverage real time performance insights which prevent you from making rigid assumptions about a person’s performance on the basis of a single event.
This will enable you to make fair rewards and recognition. It will help you recognize the efforts and performance the way it is and prevent you from anchoring your reward decisions only on one or two instances of employee performance.
b) Recency Bias
In the recency effect, you might be vulnerable to gauging the performance of your employees based on the most recent events.
In an annual feedback approach, you might end up taking into account only the most recent aspects of the performance, which will only give you a myopic view. However, with continuous feedback, you can eliminate the recency effect and offer feedback in real time to ensure that every aspect of employee performance is given due credit and their rewards and recognition give a holistic picture of their performance.
Quick Read — Read Employee Recognition 101 to learn everything about implementing employee recognition programs the right way.
2. Facilitate continuous recognition and motivation
Continuous feedback is also a great tool to create a culture of continuous recognition. This has the potential to improve organizational score on factors like engagement, motivation, retention and an overall positive employee experience.
Continuous feedback can be aligned with rewards by creating a continuous recognition program to appreciate and reward performance in real time.
- You can make an instant effort to acknowledge the contribution of your employees in public (if that’s the culture) to encourage others also to keep a consistent level of performance throughout the year rather than only on days close to the performance review.
- Continuous feedback can help you in recognizing efforts and good work as well as giving credit when credit is due rather than postponing it to the end of the year.
- It can help facilitate and fulfill the human need for instant gratification with the right praise at the right time.
More often than not, when you delay recognition due to lack of real time and continuous feedback, its impact reduces considerably and it fails to act as a motivation tool for the employees.
#Q6. How to train managers to give constructive continuous feedback?
One of the final questions that you might be struggling with would revolve around giving your managers constructive feedback in a continuous and regular manner. Here are a few ways in which you can achieve the same:
1. Capture employee data
To offer constructive and continuous feedback, managers need to be armed with employee data. This refers to not only having relevant data points about employee performance and achievements, but also insights on what they feel and their opinion about the work and workplace. Constructive and continuous feedback stems from hard evidence based on which you can have a rational conversation for improvement.
Pro-tip — SuperBeings’ intelligent Sentiment Analysis can take your employee understanding to the next level. Book a free demo today to see it in action in your organization.
2. Practice active listening
For feedback to be constructive, as a manager, you can’t simply share your point of view and expect the employee to absorb and execute the same. You need to give them a chance as well to explain why certain things panned out the way they did.
Furthermore, you need to understand from them what their plans are and how they seek to grow professionally and personally. For continuous feedback to actually be effective, you need to engage in dialogue because just listening to your monologue will end up frustrating your team members, because chances are that without their perspectives, you will end up repeating yourself every time.
Quick Read — Check out this list of 50 questions to ask in your next 1:1 meeting to ensure you are talking about what really matters.
3. Offer specific solutions
One of the key aspects of constructive feedback is to ensure that some action points or next steps or solutions are discussed. Simply sharing with your employees what is working and what is not will not suffice.
This becomes even more important when the feedback is continuous because you are talking about challenges in real time and simply stating the problem without brainstorming on a possible solution is self defeating.
This does not mean that you have to force ready made solutions for your employees. Rather, it is important to have a good conversation to collectively identify potential solutions.
#Q7. What are the challenges to developing a culture of continuous feedback?
When you implement the continuous feedback framework in your organization, you will realize that there are certain risks and challenges that are likely to come your way. It is best to anticipate them beforehand and be prepared with appropriate solutions to ensure that they don’t retard your growth and hinder performance improvement.
Some of the common pitfalls that managers all around the world have come across include:
1. Lack of consistency
The first common pitfall that stands in the way of continuous feedback success is the lack of consistency. A continuous approach to feedback requires dedicated and consistent efforts towards tracking employee performance and creating feedback on the same. However, due to various priorities, fast growing organizations tend to lack consistency when it comes to feedback.
This is why it is crucial to use a continuous feedback tool that will automate the process and supply managers with timely action recommendations.
2. Lack of manager buy in
Second, continuous feedback requires a lot of effort on the part of managers and leadership to provide the right inputs and also engage in dialogue with their employees. As opposed to annual feedback, they need to spend more time and effort on continuous feedback and that too on a regular basis. This generally leads to a resistance from the managers and an unwillingness to change the status quo.
3. Limited resources
The next common pitfall to continuous feedback comes in the form of limited resources, both human and capital. Most fast growing organizations are constrained by the availability of resources.
Therefore, even if there is a motivation to focus on continuous feedback, activities which have a direct impact on the bottom line (such as goals and OKR check-ins) take precedence. Often, organizations lack dedicated resources to manage the entire continuous feedback spectrum, which adds to its ineffectiveness and limited success.
4. Inability to follow up with action steps
Finally, for continuous feedback to bear results, it is important that feedback and reviews are followed up with action items that indicate change. However, for many organizations, feedback is seldom backed by action and next steps.
Invariably, when there is no action following the feedback, due to either lack of expertise or limited managerial competencies or lack of insights and industry best practices, level of performance improvement is negligible.
Final thoughts
We hope that we were able to answer most of your questions on continuous feedback. In case you have any more queries, you can reach out to us directly. In our experience of working with fast growing organizations, we have realized that most of them benefitted highly from partnering with platforms like SuperBeings.
Leveraging such a platform can help you ensure that on one hand, there is a consistency and continuity to your feedback approach and on the other, there are concrete next steps and way forward after the feedback which is regularly tracked to ensure effective results.
Book a demo today to get a flavor of how continuous feedback can automate your performance and 360 reviews with a highly flexible system built for reducing admin work and rater bias.
