How Continuous Performance Management Promotes Employee Engagement and Development

Employee engagement and development are perennial challenges. They nibble at productivity, fuel turnover, and siphon away innovation. They’re not merely “people problems” for HR to solve; they’re business problems that can slow or derail strategy. Continuous performance management (CPM) goes hand-in-hand with employee engagement and development by reversing the very factors employees and managers tell Gallup drag them down: too few chances to learn and grow, too little encouragement around development, not feeling connected to the company’s mission, and the sense that their opinions don’t matter. When you knit goals, coaching conversations, feedback, recognition, and analytics into one continuous loop, engagement stops being an abstract score and becomes the way work gets done.

The stats are familiar — and sobering. Gallup has reported engagement in the U.S. hovering near a third of workers and even lower globally, with declines most evident among managers and workers under 35. SHRM notes that engagement and experience now account for 42% of the influence on turnover intent.

And across survey after survey, growth and development opportunities rank among the top reasons people stay — or leave when those opportunities are absent. In this light, engagement and development aren’t nice-to-haves; they’re prerequisites for performance and the responsibility of the entire organization. Ignore them, and your highest performers will look elsewhere, taking institutional knowledge, customer trust, and momentum with them.

So how do you flip the script to boost retention, achievement, business continuity, and innovation at once? Start by removing the common blockers, then establish a performance rhythm designed for today’s pace.

6 blockers to employee engagement and development

Most employee engagement and development initiatives fail not because leaders don’t care, but because day-to-day systems work against the very outcomes they want. The blockers show up in different costumes – by team, by level, by industry – but they share a pattern: unclear aims, thin feedback loops, and poor visibility. The good news? They’re fixable.

1) Poor goal alignment and clarity

You can’t perform well – or feel engaged – if you don’t know what “good” looks like or how your work contributes. Vague, stale, or misaligned goals create confusion about expectations and priorities. Engagement follows execution: When goals are clear, current, and connected to strategy, people see wins and want to be part of more of them; when goals are fuzzy or outdated, effort fragments and disengagement follows.

2) Few development opportunities

Employees who can’t see how they’ll grow next lose energy fast. Learning efforts stuck in a portal no one visits or development plans that surface only at review time won’t cut it. Lack of skill-building and career pathways is one of the biggest drivers of attrition – especially among high performers who measure themselves by progress and the care of their employer by speed of opportunity

3) Inadequate feedback 

Traditional, top-down, infrequent appraisals leave people guessing for months while their careers stagnate. Sparse, generic, or delayed manager feedback produces two outcomes: stalled development and diminished trust. Without regular, high-quality feedback – and simple ways to ask for it – employees can’t grow or see how their contributions land.

4) Rigid, outdated performance processes

Annual or even semiannual cycles and rigid hierarchies don’t reflect how fast work moves the dynamic needs of businesses or workforces. They slow decisions, make coaching episodic, turn performance into a compliance exercise, and make development opportunities feel mundane. The result is “process for process’s sake,” with little impact on outcomes or careers. These systems can stifle autonomy, reduce morale, and fail to address real-time challenges, leaving employees feeling disempowered.

5) Insufficient managerial skills and support

Most managers want to lead well, but they are often ill-equipped or poorly supported. Without simple tools, prompts, and training, managers struggle to set clear expectations, run effective 1:1s, or coach on development. Manager workloads compound the problem, leaving them feeling overburdened and their employees discouraged and disengaged. 

6) Fragmented tools and data

When goals, conversations, feedback, learning, skills, and analytics live in different systems – or in slides and spreadsheets – everyone loses time, insight arrives late, and career growth is delayed 

How continuous performance management addresses engagement and development

Engagement and development aren’t distinct events. Betterworks’ continuous performance management software addresses root causes like misalignment, poor feedback loops, and low visibility of skills – by connecting performance and development goals, coaching conversations, feedback, and analytics in one operating rhythm. Instead of treating symptoms, CPM bakes clarity, growth opportunities, and momentum into daily work. The payoff cascades: When people see purpose, get timely input, and feel progress, they perform better and stay longer, improving business performance in the process. 

Agile development goals aligned with performance

Annual or semi-annual development goals often lag behind the pace of change in today’s workplace. As business needs evolve, so must employee growth. Betterworks Goals brings agility to development by empowering employees to set, update, and track growth goals in real time – and align them directly to performance outcomes. With immediate visibility into progress, managers can recognize newly acquired skills and support stretch opportunities that move both the employee and the business forward. 

Development in the flow of work

Development sticks when it’s part of how you work, not in another system to visit when time permits. With Betterworks, employees can set development goals alongside performance goals and see both in the same place where they track progress. They can request developmental feedback from their manager, invite peer input on a new skill, and log milestones as they happen without having to engage in a scavenger hunt across tools.

Because Betterworks integrates with the apps people already use – such as Workday, Google Sheets, Excel, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and LinkedIn Learning  – development becomes far easier to record and track. Course completions can feed developmental goal progress, and a Teams conversation can trigger an on-the-spot feedback request. Employees and managers avoid the clicks and clunkiness associated with logging into multiple systems to record progress. Effortlessness leads to better follow-through.  

Create a culture of performance and development ownership

Employees shouldn’t have to wait for scheduled reviews to discuss growth. With Betterworks Anytime Conversations, they can request guidance or development discussions when it matters most. HR can support managers with role-based conversation templates, so coaching is consistent and never starts from scratch. Employees can also ask for peer feedback tied to specific goals – making it timely, relevant, and actionable.

The result is shared ownership: employees drive their development, managers make coaching a habit. It’s empowering, it boosts engagement, and it makes progress visible and worth celebrating.

Improve visibility for employees and managers

Employees need a simple way to show progress on development and connect it to business results. Managers need a line of sight into who’s building what skills and how that translates into impact.

Betterworks Goals are flexible, so that employees can create both performance and development goals and link them. Picture a solutions engineer with a performance goal to improve demo data quality. Rather than waiting in a queue for technical help, she sets a development goal to learn vibe coding so she can achieve her business goal. Her developmental milestones link directly to the performance outcome. Managers see both tracks in one view, making coaching concrete and linking upskilling with business results.

This visibility also helps managers spot engagement signals that are a hallmark of high-potential employees: who’s curious, who proposes strategy tweaks and leads experiments, who documents what they’re learning. 

Bolster managers with self-service guidance and AI

Upskilling managers is table stakes, but many – especially new managers – need real-time guidance. When HR is stretched thin or unable to help in the moment, that support often isn’t available. Betterworks eases the burden with configurable question templates in Conversations and 1:1s that managers can use to guide discussions, plus self-service resources through Betterwork Guides. HR can provide content when managers need it most – from coaching videos to feedback playbooks – to help managers lead with confidence.

AI closes the confidence gap. Conversation Assist helps managers convey their expectations clearly and professionally and provides employees with actionable insights. Feedback Assist suggests objective, balanced, professional responses that strengthen manager and peer relationships, while Feedback Summary synthesizes inputs from the Betterworks platform for faster, higher-quality reviews. Customers like LivePerson have cut manager performance review time by up to 75% without sacrificing quality. The upside of AI assistants isn’t just efficiency. It’s better coaching, delivered more often. Learn more about how managers and AI are a winning formula for team success.

Surface development with better data

HR leaders and managers need to be able to make informed decisions about who’s ready for promotion and who needs additional development or skill-building. 

A continuous and interconnected system, like Betterworks, produces rich, recent data about goals, feedback, and outcomes, so that employee readiness is evidence-based.

With Betterworks Advanced Analytics, HR can spot patterns that lead to better decisions. For example, if a sales team sets a development goal to improve communication skills with prospective customers, analytics can highlight correlations between prospect meeting progression and the volume of manager feedback sales reps received on their presentation skills. Analytics also flag potential disengagement, such as stalled goals and missed check-ins. And, it can surface high-potential employees whose behaviors, like initiative, learning velocity, and peer recognition, signal that they’re high-potentials. That’s priceless after a reorg or leadership change when you’re establishing a new bench of talent.

Combined with Betterworks Engage, which allows HR to gather employee feedback and identify patterns in their responses, HR leaders will gain the needed insights to deliver a better employee experience.

Betterworks for employee engagement and development at a glance

Challenge	Need	Betterworks solution
Poor/unclear goal alignment	Establish goals that are clear, current, and connected to performance and business strategy.	Goals provides the flexibility to create and update performance and growth goals when needed, driving engagement and elevating personal achievement.
Few development opportunities	Build growth into daily tools and routines.	Integrations with apps employees use daily eliminate friction, making it easier to update development and performance progress.
Inadequate feedback	Empower employees with timely input and improve manager coaching.	Anytime Conversations enable employees to ask for feedback on development and performance goal progress and promote a coaching mindset for managers.
Rigid/outdated performance processes	Create a connected and continuous cadence of goal achievement and coaching.	Goals, Conversations, 1:1s, and Feedback work together to instill purpose, instill timely input, and seed progress, helping  employees perform better and stay longer.
Insufficient managerial skills/support	Make guidance, prompts, and AI support available to assist managers.	Configurable discussion templates for Conversations and 1:1s, and AI Assist for Conversations, Feedback and Feedback Summaries improve the quality of manager-employee interactions. In-app Guides deliver self-service pointers and instructions.
Fragmented tools/data	Provide a single source of truth with actionable insights.	Advanced Analytics dashboards surface engagement and development issues for better decision-making and proactive resolution. Betterworks Engage further supports data gathering efforts by providing a single source of honest feedback.

Making employee engagement and development easier for HR

Robust employee engagement and development aren’t just goals – they’re drivers of better business outcomes. Betterworks helps HR remove the barriers to engagement and retention with a simple, flexible solution that grows with your organization – backed by a partnership you can count on through every season of change.

Flexibility and configurability 

Your tech stack is unique. Your teams are, too. Betterworks plays well with legacy systems and lets you design a consistent performance and development framework that still respects local ways of working. HR admins can adjust cycles, tailor templates (by function or persona), and even tweak UI elements – without code. Need a pulse survey this week, or a dashboard to spot disengagement clues or coaching weaknesses? Spin them up without needing IT’s help. From Slack and Teams nudges to matrixed goal structures and configurable conversations, the platform adapts to complex, evolving organizations.

Simplicity and adoption 

Betterworks pairs a consumer-grade UI with deep integrations and AI-assisted tools for goals, feedback, and conversations so that employees, managers, and HR actually enjoy using it. When it’s effortless to see, update, and discuss performance and development goals, people keep the system up to date, managers feel supported – not overwhelmed – and leaders get a real-time view of performance and development.

Expert implementation and support 

Change doesn’t have to be daunting. Betterworks Professional Services leads phased rollouts, bringing best practices from hundreds of implementations. The team delivers projects on time and on budget at exceptionally high rates and supports you beyond go-live, with dedicated customer success partners who ensure your performance enablement suite evolves with your needs. That de-risks the journey and accelerates time to value.

The business payoff beyond a higher engagement score

When employees see purpose, get meaningful feedback, and feel progress, they stay and grow. When managers have simple tools and AI support, they coach more effectively. When HR has clean, connected data, it can invest in what works. The benefits ripple outward—fewer regrettable departures, faster skill-building, stronger execution, and a healthier leadership pipeline. 

Sustained engagement and development come from a continuous loop of clarity, coaching, feedback, recognition, and insight. With continuous performance management, employee engagement and development become part of daily work, turning growth into a habit, not a hope – helping your workforce learn faster than the market changes and promoting retention for better business outcomes.