Significance of Continuous Feedback for Performance Appraisals

The objective behind the performance appraisal process is to correct, guide, and motivate employees. It also facilitates the growth of the employees and helps in achieving business goals. Appraisals as a norm are held once or twice a year in most of the organisations. It is only during these times that employees and managers sit together to discuss and review last year’s performance. These discussions take the form of a monologue delivery from the manager’s perspective. Hence, employees find it challenging to voice their aspirations and concerns. Furthermore, the outcome of the appraisal discussion may be ruled by judgments and cognitive biases.

For employees to consistently grow and develop, it’s important that they receive continuous feedback from their manager and other colleagues, instead of the once a year feedback. Continuous feedback offers managers the opportunity to focus on achievements, areas of improvement and ultimately, extend the employees potential.

Continuous feedback will:

• Provide managers with access to employee annual achievements thereby enabling them to overcome bias in terms of timeliness.
• Facilitate stakeholder involvement in the documented dialogue and averting any kind of personal bias.
• Overcome individual tendencies towards strictness or leniency and thereby avoids bias owing to the varied inputs received from all the stakeholders.
• Facilitate timely discussion of the relevant points at the time of their occurrence. This helps provide to the point, honest, and objective feedback.

Organisations are realising the significance of continuous employee growth, skill development, and the dynamic nature of the work environment. Hence they are making a priority to review and update the goals of employees and the performance process at regular intervals. Continuous feedback plays a significant role in the appraisal process of an organisation. However, organisations need to be proactive and agile to reap the benefits of continuous feedback.

Listed below are the important steps in achieving continuous feedback success:

1. Identify holes in the current appraisal process.
2. Keep the lines of communication open with the employees.
3. Discuss the issues, the proposed changes, and the impact of these changes.
4. Have discussion based goal setting with your employees.
5. Align the business objectives and the business goals with the aspirations of your employees.
6. Instil a culture of conversation initiated from the top down
7. Initiate role centric change management programs.
8. Create focus groups to assist managers in comprehending the need for change.
9. Motivate  employees for a sense of ownership towards the appraisal process.
10. Motivate employees to initiate discussions, communicate with managers, and ensure that the points of discussion are properly documented.
11. Encourage  employees to share continuous updates pertaining to their personal progress.
12. Encourage managers to offer continuous guidance for achieving the goals and staying on track.
13. Empower HR to actively participate in discussions so that they can assist with the proper implementation of the process.

Proper implementation and utilisation of continuous feedback will facilitate a manager to keep the goals and employee efforts relevant and in line with the dynamic organisational objectives. It will also help in providing clarity of roles to the employees. Continuous feedback will facilitate managers to keep track of the progress of employees and provide the relevant course corrections. It will also help in motivating and appreciating the efforts of employees and help in developing a good working relationship. All this helps the organisation cultivate focused and engaged employees and, steadily move towards achieving organisational objectives.