85% of employees who have weekly conversations with their managers show higher productivity, Research suggests. According to DarwinBox, 73% of organizations strongly reckon that the continuous feedback process is one of the key drivers of business growth and development.  

It is an undeniable truth that happy and engaged employees create a great positive impact on the business.  

On the other hand, the companies are also growing out of the old school mentality of traditional performance management methods, perhaps should I say, performance appraisal, because they did not have the new concept of managing and improving employee performance throughout the year.  

Continuous performance management is gaining strong momentum with the advancement in technology, which helps the human resources department to have a seamless workflow and increase the productivity of the workforce.  

One of the inevitable and the most powerful feature of a robust performance management system is continuous feedback. Continuous feedback is the conversations between the manager and the team member. Conducting such sessions is not hard, but making the team member open up about his/her concerns is definitely a herculean task that has only one key. That is strong leadership.  

Here are 4 simple ways to implement continuous feedback without much hassle. 

All You Need is A Culture That Can Accept New Ideas 

Remember Peter Drucker, this one quote is used everywhere, and that is because it has become the universal business truth. Culture does eat strategy for breakfast. No matter how hard you try or how powerful your plans are, if you do not have the right strategy, all your efforts would go in vain.  

Continuous feedback should be received well by the employees, and only an open and transparent culture can facilitate it. The core values of the organization should include open-mindedness, integrity, trust, honesty, and adaptability to practice and make continuous feedback a huge success. 

Having those core values is not enough but you should check the adherence level of employees to the culture through a culture score survey, for which Synergita could help a great deal.  

Take the Inputs of Employees While Setting Goals 

You cannot immediately start with continuous feedback because that would just lead you to an irrelevant exchange of dialogues, which would not help you get any insight out of it. Therefore, before thinking of implementing continuous feedback, start taking the inputs of your team members while setting goals and guide them in setting the right objectives that align with the overall business objective. 

The employees know what is expected out of them, and they will trust you more as you are ready to guide them in the correct direction. Besides, you and your team members would have learned a bit more about each other.  

A goal-setting framework like OKR promotes collaboration and supports effective communication among team members to achieve the team objective that quarter. Accountability and autonomy in OKR further increase the involvement and commitment of employees in the goal-setting process, thus setting the right platform for the implementation of continuous employee feedback.  

Let’s Start with Regular One-on-One Meetings 

Obviously, now you know what your employees’ goals are and how they progress toward them. And so, you can start conducting frequent one-on-one meetings and guide them along the way even if they seem to go on the wrong path. That will enhance the overall employee experience and also becomes much easier to bring in the continuous feedback culture. 

The managers can utilize these sessions to connect with the employees and learn their strengths and weaknesses apart from discussions on goals. They can also arrange meetings that do not have regular dialogues about goals but personal and professional development. This strengthened manager-employee relations can help a business to weather any kind of storm.  

Effective Communication and Strong Leadership 

A manager should communicate effectively with the employees to make them speak. This demonstrates a strong leadership quality. If a manager lacks effective communication and leadership skills, though the continuous performance feedback system is brought in, it would be no different than how employees treat the annual performance review process.  

Just like cascading any new initiative from the top tier to the lowest level of the workforce, continuous feedback’s pros should be communicated to the entire organization. A/B testing of the continuous feedback appraisal system should be done, starting from a small team to a business unit to the whole organization.  

These four ways should be first worked on, and they do not only help continuous feedback to be smoothly implemented but any kind of initiative can be taken to the entire company leaving nothing behind.  

Benefits of Continuous Feedback! Why Does Everyone Insist on Its Importance? 

1. Higher productivity 
2. Quality Work
3. Innovation 
4. Stress-free work environment 
5. Enhanced employee experience 
6. The improved customer satisfaction rate 
7. On-time delivery 
8. Better employee engagement rate 

Do you see that implementing one powerful feature shows huge results that can forever positively change the profitability of your business? That is the power of continuous performance feedback. Through this mechanism, managers can also recommend training programs and make development plans to help employees upskill themselves. 

A Tech Tool for Continuous Feedback is a Must-Have 

Technology is an indispensable add-on. The process can be done manually but tracking records, analyzing the sentiments of the users, prompting the user to give constructive feedback, and engaging the employees can be done only with the help of effective performance management and engagement software like Synergita.  

In the remote working scenario, technology can keep the employees and management together, despite where they work from, through the continuous feedback process.  

Also, the important thing is no one would feel isolated like those initial days of lockdown because everyone would be connected if there is an innovative performance management software in place which includes other features like 360 degree feedback, Rewards and recognition, goal-setting, one-on-one meetings summary, training programs and development plans, OKR, etc.  

In addition to that, the software would be able to provide accurate insights and customized reports to help companies make informed decisions.

Also Read: 4 Steps to bring Continuous Feedback Culture