10 benefits of continuous feedback in social care

In the CQC’s State of Care 2022/23, they outline how leadership teams play a key role in shaping their organisation’s culture, and ‘services need to address low levels of staff satisfaction and high levels of stress and work overload…’ to improve job fulfilment and staff wellbeing throughout health and social care.

In this article, we’re looking at 10 key benefits of continuous performance feedback, and how it can be the driving force to enhancing your care organisation.

10 ways continuous feedback can enhance your care organisation

1. Real-time feedback

You’ll be only too aware just how busy your service can be. And it can mean that even when your teams want to give feedback, a rushed message could end up being unclear or it may be the feedback is simply left unsaid because your teams just didn’t have the chance to share their thoughts when it was at the forefront of their minds.

Real-time performance feedback helps to tackle this, keeping your employees motivated and valued as they continue to be recognised for the hard work they’re doing as they’re doing it. And it means that any constructive feedback being given is relevant to the moment, so your teams can responsively improve and grow.

2. Improving care quality

Instead of waiting for quarterly or even yearly check-ins to see how they’re getting on, continuous performance feedback lets your staff know exactly where they’re excelling and what they could work on in real-time.

And when your teams know what their strengths are and where they could improve, it helps them approach their care delivery with a clear understanding of what they need to be focusing on. With this continuous feedback, they can consistently review and adjust their practices, ensuring high-quality care delivery every single day.

3. Identify training

With continuous performance feedback, your managers are able to quickly identify any areas of improvement, setting their employees relevant goals to work towards. These goals can be around both personal development and company aims to ensure teams are improving their own skills whilst aligning with the specific needs of your service.

And having set these goals, managers can then put into play any training that may be beneficial, helping to upskill the workforce and build your teams’ confidence.

4. Professional development

Career progression is a very real opportunity in social care. 59% of social care posts in 2023 were recruited internally from other roles within the sector, according to Skills for Care. And on average, workers had 9.6 years of experience in adult social care with 76% having worked in the sector for at least three years.

With continuous performance feedback, your care workers get the opportunity to regularly discover where they can develop skills, set goals and progress their career with your organisation, empowering them to take control over their professional development.

5. Boosting morale and retention

Retaining your hardworking staff is crucial for delivering high-quality and timely care. Continuous performance feedback helps to ensure your teams are being recognised and appreciated for their efforts. And as the busy sector continues to tackle high turnover rates and growing demand, positive recognition can help boost job satisfaction and morale, playing a key role in employee retention.

6. Promoting accountability

Real-time performance feedback helps to encourage an important sense of responsibility and ownership in your employees around the actions they take and the decisions they make. Having consistent feedback about what has been done well and where improvements could be made in the future reinforces the responsibility each of your employees have for delivering high quality, compliant care to your clients.

7. Communication

As you know, effective communication is a vital part of care delivery, but it also plays an important role in performance management too. Having consistent, real-time feedback helps to keep communication constructive, making sure any expectations or goals are clear and understood.

Plus, having this open dialogue can be key for reminding your teams just how valued they are. All of which boosts satisfaction, trust and engagement.

8. Knowledge sharing

Constructive performance feedback allows your teams to easily share their knowledge, give each other advice and recognise times where they’ve learned from others.

This not only helps boost morale when excellent work is being noted, but it also creates a space where each of your employees are encouraged to collaborate, helping promote a sense of belonging and teamwork.

9. Realistic view of performance

When your teams frequently work close together, perhaps in residential care or in the back office, they may have more opportunities to recognise a job well done. But can we say the same for those working more independently, like domiciliary or supported living workers? And even so, while word of mouth feedback is helpful, it may not get the recognition it deserves by the management team who weren’t present.

Using a continuous performance feedback tool, your teams can quickly and easily send feedback – whether highlighting strengths or offering advice – that can then be reviewed by management, giving them a fairer view of that employee’s performance. That way, excellent work never goes unnoticed.

10. Culture & engagement

In a busy sector like social care, giving feedback to a colleague can get easily overlooked or pushed down the priority list in favour of other important tasks. But when your service encourages feedback culture, you will likely see a boost in employee engagement with your teams feeling more valued and acknowledged for the work they do.

So, to have a successful feedback culture, the process needs to be easy and effective. Our intuitive Performance & Talent solution even uses artificial intelligence (AI) to support your care teams when writing their feedback. The AI makes feedback writing quicker, but also helps employees that may struggle to put what they want to say in the right words.

Continuous Performance Management for social care providers

Giving and receiving continuous performance feedback helps to empower your teams to take charge of their own growth journey, and can work wonders for boosting morale, professional development and employee retention.

Our continuous performance management software, Performance & Talent, is designed to help your people fulfil their true potential.

And you can see the software in action in our webinar here: How to Optimise your Workforce