Ongoing feedback
Our high-frequency VUCA Feedback tool for pointed and intensive personnel development processes
Ongoing feedback: what is that?
By ongoing feedback we mean an innovative feedback mode in which
- at regular, fixed intervals (e.g. monthly or once a quarter) and
- with a short questionnaire (often <10 individual statements)
- feedback is collected from particularly relevant people in the professional environment
Ongoing Feedback aims to provide intensive feedback. Ongoing feedback is particularly useful in addition to (or as a follow-up to) traditional 360° feedback.
This form of continuous and regular formal feedback, which results in more frequent discussions about goals and work performance, meets the changing needs of people in organisations in times of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). Managers and employees thus learn to use these regular impulses for personal development.
Eva’s feedback journey – course of a proto-typical ongoing feedback
The Ongoing Feedback from Eva is a typical example of a promising feedback process. A favourable, if not necessary, requirement is that our fictional feedback recipient Eva strives for a change in her own behaviour, but has not yet been able to implement this. Often this intrinsic motivation for change results from a previously conducted 360° feedback. Eva has decided to focus for one year on a certain behaviour pattern that has ruined opportunities for her in the past. Especially for the next career steps, her environment expect her to be more mature in dealing with conflicts. The regular feedbackLOOPS lead to three essential effects:
- Increased self-reflection. In each FeedbackLOOP, Eva’s self-image is compared with the image her environment has of her. Eva’s view of herself becomes sharper.
- Increased motivation to work on the topic (in our example: conflict behaviour), because the successes of behavioural changes are visualised promptly in the preparation of results and supplemented by constructive comments from the feedback providers.
- Increased attention of the environment (colleagues, employees, superiors) often results in additional feedback and helpful discussions even outside the “Ongoing Feedback” tool.
Eva decided on a total of four feedbackLOOPS over the course of a year, because a high feedback frequency can lead to survey fatigue among the feedback providers, in other words to a certain lack of interest in the feedback process. This should be avoided.
What does our ongoing feedback tool do?
Function description:
- The Itempool can be adapted to customer requirements or based on the company’s own 360° questionnaire.
- Focusing on a few behavioural aspects through targeted selection of items (questionnaire statements).
- Own items can be added.
- Feedback providers can be divided into meaningful groups so that the results are easier to interpret.
- Feedback providers can make each evaluation more concrete with a free text commentary.
- Particularly useful feedback can be marked as such and reported back to the author (without dissolving his anonymity) (feedback on feedback).
- Live presentation of the results, whereby evaluation rules can be taken into account to maintain the anonymity of the feedback providers.
Difference to other feedback instruments for personnel/management development
The ongoing feedback can be clearly distinguished from the established 360° feedback by the features listed below.
| Traditional 360° feedback | Ongoing feedback | |
|---|---|---|
| Content | Prescribed contents, but better comparability | More individual questionnaire; own questions can also be formulated |
| Frequency | Mostly annually or every two years | Event related: weekly, monthly or quarterly |
| Initiation | Often centrally by HR department or company management | Decentrally by the manager, a coach or even by the feedback recipients themselves |
| Scope | long | short |
| Technology | online and/or pen & paper | exclusively online |
Furthermore, the ongoing feedback has to be distinguished from other innovative feedback variants:
- Instant feedback: Spontaneous survey without thematic specifications and based on freely available survey tools. These procedures usually do not take into account any research findings on the effects of feedback in the context of personnel development and require profound survey know-how. The results are immediately available.
- Always-on feedback: With Always-On Feedback, the feedback recipients are constantly exposed to the situation that they could be digitally evaluated – the feedback channel is open at all times. This does not require any explicit initiation by the feedback recipients. Crews & Captains also offers this feedback mode.
- Kudo feedback: A feature of this feedback mode is that feedback recipients receive so-called virtual kudos (from Greek: κῦδος (kydos) for fame, honour) from others, in the form of badges (“favourite colleague”), which are intended to express appreciation. Only one facet of feedback is taken into account, which means that no complete picture can be given. Kudo feedback is therefore not suitable for targeted personnel development planning and can only play a complementary role.
A detailed examination of the different feedback modes can be found in the review article “Feedback trends in organisations: 360°, Ongoing, Instant, Always-on and Kudo” by Holtmeier, S., & Mertin, I. (2020).
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