A continuous feedback approach supports a general employee appetite for relevant and timely performance management. In this article, PeopleFluent Product Marketing Manager Katie Coleman considers how organizations can adopt and then optimize their approach to continuous feedback, while avoiding overloading busy managers and employees.

In the recent PeopleFluent-sponsored ‘Future of Performance Management 2024-25 Report,’ 60% of the HR professionals surveyed stated that their approach to performance management would grow to include more frequent or continuous feedback within the next two years. 50% of respondents said that their current process already allows for continuous feedback.

However, continuous feedback was found to be more prevalent in smaller organizations (61%) than in mid- (50%) and larger-sized organizations (51%). These findings reflect a claim by Gallup, that while “many organizations know continuous feedback is best” they nonetheless “struggle with activating the ongoing behaviors needed to achieve it at scale.”

There are, after all, ways to deliver continuous feedback suboptimally—“continuous” is only one step removed from “unrelenting”, and if you don’t want to overwhelm employees and managers alike, you need to achieve the right mix of regular and meaningful. So how do you create the right approach? Let’s consider six ways you can enhance your organization’s continuous feedback strategy.

A Recap of the Benefits of Continuous Feedback

But first, it’s worth considering—why are organizations so keen to implement continuous feedback anyway? Continuous feedback:

• Drives employee growth: Managers no longer have to wait several months to check whether employees are utilizing development time, or to assess whether their development goals and work are sufficiently growth-orientated.
• Provides real-time insights into employee performance and satisfaction: Regular check-ins help managers understand how their direct reports are feeling and how they’re progressing with individual tasks. This information helps people better react to issues and celebrate successes.
• Improves employee engagement: Gallup research has consistently found that employees are significantly more likely to be engaged when managers give feedback a few times a week or more. 
• Facilitates stronger relationships: Regular contact is an essential part of any growing relationship and continuous feedback provides a structure around which other important professional conversations can form.
• Helps employees understand job duties and goals: With regular feedback events, your leaders can give employees frequent opportunities to adjust their performance in line with expectations and leave less time for errors and bad habits to accumulate.

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6 Tips for Enhancing Your Continuous Feedback Approach

1) Use Continuous Feedback to Complement Performance Reviews

Adopting continuous feedback doesn’t have to mean completely doing away with performance reviews, and the strategy can actually be used to strengthen your organization’s approach to tent-pole performance review events. If you’re asking teams to have conversations all year round, they can be more economical with mid-year and annual reviews—they’ll be simply reviewing points they’ve been talking through regularly, and working toward all along.

Meanwhile, it’s still useful to have a space to deal with the longer-term picture, and that’s where performance reviews come in. These milestones allow your people to consider how much progress has been made over the period, and to resurface achievements and talking points from earlier in the cycle.

2) Remain Timely

A continuous feedback structure will naturally incline your managers toward offering timely feedback: current projects will be the obvious topic during a regular check-in, and progress can be reviewed from session to session. In this way, nobody is left to wait until annual review season to provide feedback, or discuss specific roadblocks. However, this does require your managers to come to sessions informed about what their reports are currently working on, and armed with real-time examples of what is being done right and wrong. Short, weekly conversations of 15 to 30 minutes are ideal.

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3) Make Space for Informal Feedback

Though establishing a regular cadence for feedback is important, continuous feedback means cultivating a culture where giving and receiving feedback isn’t a strictly regimented act. Informal interactions such as hallway chats and praise given during meetings should be encouraged. While informal feedback is more likely to result organically due to heightened awareness about feedback, you should train and periodically prompt your managers to think about having these impromptu interactions, and encourage employees to seize opportunities for discussion.

If feedback is given outside of a formal structure, it can only remain truly timely if the recipient is ready for it—unless there’s a specific urgent need to offer feedback, managers should ask “is now a good time?” or similar.

4) Balance Positives and Negatives (But Be Specific)

Encourage managers to steer away from offering feedback that is only either overwhelmingly positive or negative, while remaining constructive rather than critical. Or rather, it can be useful to think in terms of offering feedback that reinforces as well as feedback that redirects. If there’s behavior you want someone to keep doing, reinforce it. If there’s behavior you want them to stop doing, provide an idea of what you want them to start doing instead.

Overall, it’s generally better to aim to keep the balance towards reinforcement (i.e. positivity) than redirection.

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5) Consider a Range of Feedback Formats

Regular one-on-ones are the main venue for continuous feedback, providing a dependable cadence for a focused and relatively deep dive into progress and next steps. This is a great format for cultivating professional relationships and meaningful insights, and for emphasizing two-way communication. More delicate topics—such as underperformance or issues in the team—can be aired more confidentially, and employees will have the opportunity to give feedback on the manager’s approach.

However, continuous feedback encompasses more than just one-on-ones. In addition to the informal opportunities mentioned above, peer feedback and 360-degree feedback can help diversify the viewpoints and advice that employees receive. Another option is to host weekly feedback sessions in which employees and managers can contribute to a discussion about successes, roadblocks, solutions, and issues in the wider business. Managers should be trained to steer these sessions productively.

6) Include Goals and OKRs

Make sure that managers revisit goals, objectives, and key results as part of the continuous feedback process. While it can be beneficial to complement a more traditional performance review cycle with continuous feedback, this will not work effectively if managers arrive at mid-year and annual reviews and try to crowbar the outcomes of your ongoing conversations within the long-term goals and OKRs after the fact. One-on-ones and feedback sessions should always steer employees toward these overarching goals.

How PeopleFluent Can Help You Deliver Continuous Feedback

PeopleFluent Talent Management is a platform equipped to facilitate continuous feedback. It achieves this by:

• Helping you schedule recurring one-on-one meetings
• Letting you set and track goals (which can then be flexibly adjusted by employees and managers as the performance conversation evolves)
• Providing a space to document open-ended feedback (which can then be linked to employee goal records)
• Facilitating feedback requests from anyone in the business for the purpose of peer and 360-degree feedback
• Offering a range of management tools, including a dashboard for tracking interim ratings, notes, competency gaps, and professional development activities
• Tracking career pathing information that follows your employees from role to role

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