Employee feedback is a valuable addition to any organization’s performance management toolkit. Equipping employees with the right tools and setting clear expectations gives you a foundation for driving development and growth.
The Link Between Continuous Feedback and Employee Development
Bridge's 'Future of Performance Management’ report surveyed 300 HR professionals and highlighted some clear performance best practices. The report found that the highest-performing organizations are those that:
- Implement both formalized performance management processes and capture continuous feedback
- Use a performance management platform that’s well-integrated with their tech stack
- Measure employee performance accurately and fairly
The report also reveals that HR professionals at these organizations are four times more likely to agree that their performance management practices improve employee development and performance.
Top-down feedback exchanged during the annual review is unlikely to give someone a view of their strengths, weaknesses, and immediate areas for improvement that they can immediately apply. This insight should instead come from supervisors, coworkers, direct reports, and managers, on a frequent and ongoing basis.
By incorporating continuous feedback into your performance strategy and investing in the right tools and processes, you encourage regular, development-focused input.
Best Practices to Encourage Employees to Give and Receive Feedback
Here are some ways to embed feedback into your workflow using tech and support resources to guide you.
1) Set Expectations With Development Goals
A continuous feedback model gives people the direction to adjust behaviors or fill skills gaps in real time. Personalizing progression and growth with a set of development goals improves accountability, allowing people to take ownership and directing them toward tasks, training, or skills that will contribute toward growth.
Connecting this data with your learning and upskilling insights means people can find relevant training and development opportunities to help them improve and advance.
2) Serve Prompts and Reminders to Employees
Whether positive or constructive, feedback is more impactful when it's timely. Make sharing structured feedback habitual by weaving it into existing processes, scheduling reminders, and prompting people at relevant moments.
Using the right platform helps you find development-focused opportunities and schedule reminders and prompts. This might include before a one-on-one, from a team after completing a project milestone, or when measuring the results of training and upskilling.
3) Partner With Your People Managers
Your people managers are your greatest allies when it comes to employee development, and weekly manager-employee check-ins are an ideal format for delivering and discussing feedback.
But remember that managers often don't witness a direct report's day-to-day performance. To gain these varied perspectives, your employees should have the power to give and receive input from others they work closely with. In fact, Gartner research suggests that making talent development a joint responsibility and facilitating peer-to-peer connections makes managers five times more effective in their roles.
Incorporating this feedback into conversations gives managers the ability to recommend development opportunities, refine goals, and point employees toward skilled mentors.
MORE MANAGEMENT ENABLEMENT TIPS | ‘HR Teams: How to Get People Managers to Actually Use HR Tools’
4) Use a Consistent Competency Framework to Assess Performance
Continuous feedback can complement annual performance reviews, providing consistent guidance and encouragement for goals throughout the performance cycle.
Keep feedback aligned to organizational objectives with a clear competency framework. This way, your people are clear about what success looks like and how to achieve these goals.
You should reinforce this framework by structuring feedback to incorporate open-ended questions and rating scales that reflect your organization’s performance goals.
5) Distribute Training and Development
To make feedback part of your culture, your people must be clear about the cadence, forms, and structure you expect it to take.
Your development programs should show people what great feedback looks like, exposing them to different scenarios and giving them opportunities to practice. If you use a dedicated platform, you also check that employees understand the purpose and can use it confidently.
In addition, consider creating a series of easy-to-reference templates with question-and-answer prompts that people can customize and refine based on individual needs.
MORE WAYS TO PROMOTE FEEDBACK | ‘How to Create a Culture of Continuous Feedback’
5 Effective Feedback Methods That Drive Employee Development
Once you’ve laid the groundwork, you’ll need to consider the assessment formats and questions that you’ll use to gather employee input.
Let's look at some common workplace feedback types and best practices for getting the most out of them.
1) Skills Development Feedback
With regular, accurate skills feedback, you can identify gaps across teams or business areas while ensuring your people have the competencies necessary to successfully perform in their roles.
Employees should select at least five assessors, including their direct manager, peers, and those beyond the department, to comprehensively analyze strengths and weaknesses.
Examples of skills feedback questions:
- How does [Employee] effectively communicate with others?
- What could [Employee] do to improve time management skills?
- Does [Employee] demonstrate leadership skills?
- On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate [Employee’s] technical skills?
Examples of skills feedback answers:
- [Employee] shows accountability by fixing issues immediately as they arise.
- [Employee] has strong project management skills and was very effective when gathering requirements for the CRM implementation project.
- [Employee] needs to work on collaborating with other team members.
- [Employee] demonstrates a high level of technical understanding and uses their knowledge to help the rest of the team.
2) Recognition and Rewards
Recognition is all about celebrating small wins and sharing words of encouragement with others for things that might fly under the radar. Giving employees a public space to share praise reinforces the positive behaviors and skills that drive your organization.
In order to regularly and effectively celebrate achievements and motivate employees, Gallup recommends that employees should receive praise at least every seven days.
Examples of employee and team recognition:
- “Thank you for your help with the presentation yesterday.”
- “Thanks for the hard work you put into organizing the sales pitch. Your attention to detail and teamwork have been invaluable.”
- “Great job hitting quota in Q4.”
- “Well done to the team on a successful product launch.”
3) Performance Conversations
Recording regular feedback moments can support performance conversations. It's also a good opportunity for the direct manager, a select group of peers, and the employee to evaluate performance.
You'll want to capture feedback about different aspects of employee performance for an accurate and fair evaluation. This allows reviewers to reflect on past achievements and challenges from the previous period and offer suggestions to help people set goals and tasks for the period ahead.
Populating performance review conversation templates with feedback and ratings allows managers and employees to engage in more meaningful discussions and set personalized goals.
Examples of performance conversation questions:
- What goals has [Employee] made progress on?
- What are some of [Employee’s] most improved skills?
- What goals will help [Employee] succeed?
- What skills will help [Employee] achieve their goals?
- Rate [Employee] using the scale and description that best reflects their performance.
Examples of performance conversation responses:
- [Employee] achieved the goal of increasing lead conversion by 10%.
- In the coming year, setting a goal to become more confident in presenting to large groups will help [Employee] succeed.
- [Employee] should plan to improve data analysis skills.
- [Employee] has made progress toward their goal of improving communication, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
- I selected this rating for [Employee] because they’ve consistently exceeded expectations by making several time-saving process improvements.
- [Employee] takes on a lot without asking for help. He should balance his workload and ask for help where needed.
4) Start, Stop, Continue Feedback
It’s not always easy to ask how to make improvements. Start, stop, continue feedback encourages reflection and gives people specific actions they can implement without the need for in-depth training or upskilling initiatives. It’s ideal for those who work closely together, including managers seeking feedback about their performance from their direct reports.
This form of feedback is based on the following three questions:
- “What should I start doing?”
- “What should I stop doing?”
- “What should I continue doing?”
Employees should define their request around a specific task, skill, or behavior to ensure they receive clear evidence and guidance they can immediately interpret and implement.
Examples of Start, Stop, Continue Feedback
Example #1: Improve communication with team members.
Start: Making one-on-ones a weekly occurrence.
Stop: Avoiding difficult conversations.
Continue: Being approachable.
Example #2: Improve product quality.
Start: Reviewing code for every task.
Stop: Spending too much time on tasks that don’t directly contribute to project goals.
Continue: Keeping the team on track with daily stand-up meetings.
Example #3: Develop project management skills.
Start: Involving stakeholders in project planning from the beginning.
Stop: Setting unrealistic deadlines without team agreement.
Continue: Using weekly meetings to share updates.
5) Manager-Employe One-on-Ones
During weekly check-ins, managers and employees should focus on goal alignment, personal development, and progress toward tasks. These meetings also present an opportunity to give and receive feedback or offer words of encouragement.
Providing an agenda with discussion points and topics can keep these conversations on track and encourage deeper discussion.
In addition, these one-on-one agendas can offer a measurable format for coaching and mentoring sessions.
Examples of questions to include on the agenda:
- What additional learning would you like to take on to improve your capabilities?
- How can I help you this week?
- How could you use this feedback to improve next time?
- Do you need any additional resources to develop in this area?
CONVERSATION BEST PRACTICES | ‘9 Ways to Maximize the Effectiveness of Your 1:1s’
How Bridge Supports Continuous Feedback
You need a continuous performance process that allows people to request and share feedback at any time during the performance cycle. But to make this feedback most effective, you need to make it easy for people to make the right connections and share the most meaningful insights.
Connecting your learning, skills development, and performance data in one place with a platform like Bridge empowers you in driving performance goals through training, upskilling, and conversation.
Bridge creates a foundation for growth-focused feedback by automatically populating competencies based on job titles, helping employees and their managers select the most appropriate assessors.
They can use this information to build clearly defined development plans, assign targeted goals and training, and match employees with skilled mentors.
Skills, training, and feedback insights are stored within one-on-one agendas and performance conversations, giving managers a real-time view of performance and leading to more tactical goal-setting discussions.
DISCOVER BRIDGE’S PERFORMANCE REVIEW TOOL | ‘Performance Conversation Walkthrough’
Open Channels of Continuous Feedback With Bridge
Support employee development through continuous feedback with Bridge. Request a demo or try the interactive walkthrough to see Bridge's feedback features for yourself.
