Continuous feedback is an essential part of a meaningful performance management strategy. Read this blog post to learn how PeopleFluent helps your team implement and leverage continuous feedback initiatives to drive organizational success.

It’s hard for anyone to improve if they don’t receive consistent, effective feedback from their managers and colleagues. Feedback is a critical part of enhancing your workers’ performance. Without ongoing conversations about performance and productivity, your employees won’t necessarily be aware of inefficiencies—or how to correct them. When delivered appropriately, continuous feedback helps your employees improve their productivity and work effectively with their teammates and cross-functional peers.

Regardless of its importance, feedback won’t give you optimal results without structure. Managers are already overwhelmed with increasingly complex workloads, and giving feedback can sometimes fall by the wayside. Recent research from Gallup found that 51% of organizations have recently restructured their teams and 64% have given their employees more job responsibilities. This has left managers with more work to do while managing new teams. Asking managers to provide each of their direct reports with consistent, meaningful feedback will require you to put support in place that eases managers’ burdens while ensuring employees get the continuous feedback they need to thrive.

Fortunately, PeopleFluent Talent Management is a robust solution that supports continuous feedback initiatives. This software makes it easy for your managers and employees to have constructive, ongoing conversations about performance and productivity. Below are five ways PeopleFluent supports continuous feedback and helps your organization thrive.

READ MORE ABOUT EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK | ‘How to Future-Proof Your Performance Review Process’

1) Provide Open-Ended Feedback Linked to Goals

Researchers at Gallup found that for feedback to be meaningful, it must happen frequently and be related to employees’ current goals and work priorities. PeopleFluent Talent Management helps managers and direct reports stay connected with recurring one-on-one meetings. Managers can use this dedicated time to discuss employee progress toward professional goals, including learning opportunities that can help workers strengthen their skills.

Your teams can use the PeopleFluent software to document these conversations and link manager feedback to specific employee goals as well as company-wide objectives. Linking manager feedback helps your employees stay on track with achieving these goals—but feedback isn’t limited to just managers.

With PeopleFluent Talent Management, feedback is open-ended. Your employees can request feedback from anyone, regardless of where your organization is in its annual review cycle. Employees can give informal evaluations to their colleagues and cross-functional teams, which gives everyone a more holistic view of their current strengths and weaknesses. It also encourages a culture of collaboration and helps teams work together more effectively.

2) Schedule Check-In Meetings

Check-in meetings let your managers and their direct reports have ongoing performance conversations with an informal feel. You can configure the system so meetings occur at whatever frequency works best for your organization. This helps you ensure that your managers and their teams meet consistently to discuss professional wins, feedback on recent projects, or any other relevant work topics.

PeopleFluent Talent Management tracks these meetings so your workforce has a structure to support them, but check-ins don’t have to be included in an employee’s official performance evaluation (although they can be!). Whether your organization uses them for official evaluations or not, your employees and managers can record general notes and comments from their recurrent meetings and use that information to guide them toward reaching their goals. The software tracks any actions that are taken on both the employee and the manager side of the conversation. You can configure your check-in meetings to track goals, competencies, and any other information that’s most important for your employees’ success.

If your organization goes through a restructuring phase or experiences other changes, the check-ins feature can make employee evaluations available to newly assigned managers. In this way, performance conversations (both formal and informal) follow your employees, regardless of leadership changes. The platform ensures that new managers always have a clear understanding of their direct reports’ performance history, and employees stay on track toward their professional development goals.

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3) Set and Track Goals

Continuous feedback should help everyone get closer to achieving their goals, so it makes sense to align your performance conversations with your professional objectives. PeopleFluent’s performance solution lets your employees update their goals any time, and managers can view them as they’re updated. This helps your managers ensure that feedback conversations are aligned with the employee’s individual goals as well as larger organizational initiatives. Managers can also leverage goal tracking information to identify areas for improvement or source learning opportunities that will help their direct reports succeed.

While it’s great for employees to set their own goals, sometimes you need them to focus on specific tasks or competencies. PeopleFluent Talent Management allows goals to be assigned automatically to employees by your HR department. Managers can also assign goals to their teams. Employees can see who assigned their goals, making the process more transparent. Your workers will know exactly who to contact if they have questions about their assigned goals. Whether the goals are created by employees or assigned by someone else, they can be aligned with your organization’s overarching strategy so your workforce can see the impact their efforts have on your business’s success.

4) Support Your Managers With a Range of Tools

PeopleFluent makes it easy for your managers to assess performance and have meaningful conversations with their direct reports. Everything managers need to know about an individual employee is accessible in an easy to understand dashboard that includes:

• Interim ratings
• Feedback from peers
• Notes and comments made throughout the calendar year
• Competency gaps
• Professional development activities

Each employee’s profile continuously updates to reflect the progress they’ve made toward their goals. This gives your managers even more insight into how they should direct their ongoing feedback conversations.

5) Deliver Useful Career Tools for Employees

The software isn’t just built for administrators and managers. PeopleFluent Talent Management automatically tracks employees’ movements from role to role as they progress in their careers. Workers have access to career pathing information that lets them explore potential careers within your organization. These career paths are automatically created based on your employees’ previous and current roles within your organization, as well as their professional development activities.

Your employees can use the career paths feature to identify knowledge or skills gaps that they’ll need to close before they’re ready to take the next step in their professional journey. Your managers can also review their direct reports’ career paths and job profiles, giving them even more information to shape continuous feedback conversations.

Continuous Feedback Helps Your Workforce Thrive

Managers and employees have a lot of responsibilities, and it can be too easy to neglect informal performance conversations in favor of competing priorities. A structured approach to continuous feedback helps managers and employees make time for consistent and constructive conversations.

When your workers understand what’s going well and what they can improve, they’ll reach their goals faster and your organization will reap the rewards of having a highly skilled, productive workforce. PeopleFluent Talent Management provides that structure and support, ensuring your teams have the tools they need to make continuous feedback a priority.