Improving your talent management programs starts with giving employees meaningful, actionable feedback. In this blog post, PeopleFluent Product Marketing Manager Katie Coleman shares six tips organizations can use to make continuous feedback loops more effective.

If your organization is struggling with keeping its workers engaged, you’re not alone. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that a staggering 79% of the world’s workers aren’t engaged, and 17% of them are actively disengaged. It’s difficult to maximize your productivity and performance when you’re struggling to keep your employees interested in their roles and careers.

One way you can increase engagement is by consciously improving continuous feedback loops across your organization. Annual performance reviews and ad hoc feedback conversations aren’t enough to help most people develop and grow. Your managers and leaders need to provide continuous, constructive feedback and advice that helps employees understand what works and adjust what doesn’t.

When your organization establishes a culture of continuous feedback, you can improve performance, enhance workforce engagement, build stronger teams, and guide employees through their professional development journeys. Boost your organization’s continuous feedback program with the following six strategies.

READ MORE ON PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK | ‘6 Quick Tips That Ensure Talent Management Review Success’

1) Be Specific to Drive Impact

When managers use generic feedback like, “Good job,” or “This could have been better,” employees are left wondering what exactly they got right or wrong. Providing concrete examples and sharing specific details helps your employees better understand which actions were productive and which skills need more refinement. Specific feedback helps your teams modify their daily behaviors and actions more effectively so they can improve their performance and productivity.

Coach your managers to avoid generalizations when offering feedback during formal and informal evaluations. Let’s say a manager has a direct report who’s too reactive. Instead of the manager saying, “You could be more proactive,” instruct them to share a specific example with their employee. Managers should name a recent time, place, or situation where the employee could have been more effective. For example, they might say something like the following:

“During last week’s client meeting, you waited for the client to ask about next steps. Going forward, I’d like you to proactively suggest action items by the end of the meeting to keep momentum going.”

By providing specific feedback, your managers can clarify their expectations for every team member. This makes it easier for employees to recognize their achievements and understand where they could improve. It also helps drive faster professional growth.

2) Prioritize Timeliness and Consistency

Feedback needs to be timely if you want it to truly impact your workers’ behavior. Encourage your managers to share feedback with their direct reports as soon as possible after an event or activity. If they don’t, their feedback will lose its effectiveness. When managers provide daily feedback, workers are 3.6 times more likely to be motivated to do outstanding work. Employees will be far less receptive to their managers’ ideas and opinions if they’re offered weeks or months after an event. It’s easier for employees to connect feedback with their actions when the activities or events are fresh in their minds.

It’s also important for your managers to consistently offer feedback, as opposed to haphazardly sharing their thoughts. Instead of having one-off conversations, encourage managers to build quick touchpoints into their teams’ workflows. Weekly standups, project briefings, and regular one-on-one meetings are all opportunities for managers to share appropriate feedback with their teams. A standing one-to-one meeting with each direct report is a great way for managers to give specific feedback to individuals, while group meetings or project briefs give your leaders the opportunity to share feedback that might apply to their entire team. Regardless of how each manager structures their feedback sessions, it’s important to maintain consistency and timeliness so that performance conversations are effective.

KEEP READING | ‘How HR & Learning Tech Helps Enterprises Stay Agile in an Uncertain World’

3) Offer Actionable Suggestions

Telling an employee what doesn’t work well won’t be enough for them to show improvement. Your managers’ feedback should include action steps. When managers identify areas where someone could improve, they need to share practical advice or tips that the employee can implement right away. Encourage your managers to use the following framework when offering feedback:

Situation → Behavior/Action → Impact → Next Steps

In other words, your manager should start by describing the situation in which the employee’s action occurred. Then, they should mention the employee’s behavior or action and its impact. Finally, the manager should offer some suggestions of what the employee can do to improve going forward. Contextualizing the feedback and offering clear, practical suggestions will help employees understand and apply their manager’s advice in the future.

4) Use Positive Framing to Build Confidence

When your employees only receive negative feedback, they’ll be more likely to lose confidence and possibly disengage from their roles. While you don’t want your manager to avoid discussing what can be improved, it’s still important to also share positive feedback that encourages workers. Starting performance conversations with positive feedback builds employee confidence and reinforces desirable behaviors. It also helps workers to become more receptive to constructive feedback.

Train your managers to use positive framing when giving feedback. Start with an employee’s positive attribute or behavior before sharing any areas for improvement. Managers should also avoid commenting on an employee’s personality traits. Feedback should focus on behaviors in order to keep performance conversations professional and productive. In practice, a manager using positive framing with a direct report might look like the following example:

“You consistently show great attention to detail in your internal presentations. I’d love to see you apply that same thoroughness when preparing client-facing materials to ensure the highest quality across all touchpoints.”

HANDPICKED FOR YOU | ‘Bridging the Skills Gap: 7 Proven Tips to Enhance Employee Development’

5) Foster Open, Two-Way Communication

Feedback conversations shouldn’t just flow from managers to employees. For your continuous feedback program to truly succeed, your employees should feel empowered to share their thoughts and opinions with their managers and other organizational leaders. Your entire workforce should feel comfortable having respectful, open conversations about productivity and performance.

However, it’s possible that individual contributors might not feel comfortable giving honest feedback to their managers or other leaders. It’s important to establish an organizational culture that encourages open communication at all levels of your business. Your managers can help by asking their direct reports for feedback or hosting “office hours” for individuals to drop in with comments or suggestions. Some workers still won’t feel comfortable sharing their feedback with managers. Anonymous feedback surveys give them an opportunity to share their opinions while helping your managers “sense check” their performance as team leaders.

6) Ensure Feedback Conversations Are Respectful and Productive

It’s important to recognize that not all employees will naturally know how to give and receive productive feedback. Luckily, this is a communication skill that any employee can learn. Be prepared to train workers at all levels on how to have performance conversations that are both productive and respectful.

Consider including a workplace communications course among your organization’s ongoing training programs. This can help every employee improve vital communication skills that can make feedback conversations more effective and productive for managers and direct reports. Include topics like:

• Active listening techniques
• Using positive frameworks
• Managing emotional reactions to feedback
• Ensuring understanding with clarifying questions

When you ensure your workforce is trained on how to give and receive feedback, your managers and employees are more likely to engage in respectful conversations that ultimately boost productivity and performance.

ENHANCE YOUR CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK PROGRAM | ‘Improve Your HR Efficiency With AI Integrations and More Upgrades From the Latest PeopleFluent Talent and Compensation Update’