40 Best Start Stop Continue Templates (Word, Excel, PDF, PPT)

Feedback is one of the most important things you need to run your business successfully. Through feedback, you can understand your company’s current performance and find out ways to keep improving. When you receive feedback and share it with your employees, they can learn more effective ways to perform their tasks. They can streamline their practices to improve their performance, which will also benefit your company. By conducting a simple exercise with your team, you can improve the way your employees receive and accept feedback. You can do this with the use of a stop start continue feedback template.

Start Stop Continue Templates

What is Start Stop Continue exercise?

Start stop continue examples involve running a retrospective to identify specific actions that you should either start, stop, or continue doing. You can work with your team to come up with an agreement on the most significant steps to be more successful and productive. Set these actionable points at the end of your exercise.

Giving and getting feedback can be very challenging. It’s not easy to look back and categorize your decisions as negative or positive. But using a Start Stop Continue framework will make it easier to think about your team’s performance. It’s a simple yet powerful tool that will give you the authority to make decisions on what you want to change so you can move forward. A start stop continue template will divide decisions and activities into:

• Things you should start doing
• Things you should stop doing
• Things you should continue doing

Start Stop Continue Examples

Why is this exercise important?

The start stop continue exercise has several advantages depending on who or what you focus on. For instance, if you’re an event planner, you can use the exercise to determine what worked in your past events, and what didn’t. In such a case, the exercise is even more important because many events have gone virtual, which means that there is plenty of room to improve.

If you’re an operations manager in a business where you manage different departments, you can use this exercise too. With so many responsibilities to deal with, the start stop continue exercise will help learn how to focus only on things that will help your company the most.

You can also use this approach to assess your company as a whole and this is very advantageous, especially for small businesses. The start stop continue template will ensure that all of the feedback given are action-oriented and will allow your employees to use that feedback to improve. Since this is a team-oriented approach, it gives each member the opportunity to align their goals and actions based on shared priorities. Here are some other benefits of this approach:

Creates a feedback framework

An important aspect of this exercise is to have an open discussion about your team’s performance. It gives the members of your team the chance to express their dissatisfaction by offering a framework for them to suggest removing certain practices that don’t benefit their performance at work. The exercise also provides the opportunity to give positive feedback about the practices that work, which team wants to continue.

Encourages everyone to share their ideas

The members of your team can give recommendations and ideas on the best ways to approach any task, which will encourage continuous improvement. When you’re open to ideas from your team, you will allow them to constructively think about their performance and ways to improve. The process can also promote broad thinking by allowing your team members to analyze the successful practices and think about what could work in the future.

It allows you to focus on collaboration and action

An objective of this exercise is to encourage consensus among the team members regarding action items. Through this process, you can determine what everyone does and how they perform their tasks. It also provides a level of accountability to the team members who are most affected by the decisions you make, which encourages engagement. When those team members participate, they can express their opinions to directly affect the processes that you will change.

When to use the start stop continue template?

If you look at start stop continue examples for boss, you will realize that it’s an effective approach to gathering valuable data at different levels. On an individual level, you can use this approach to ask your peers for feedback on what you should stop doing, start doing and continue doing to accomplish all of your objectives. Leaders can also use this approach to collect feedback on how to improve the whole organization. Other ways to use this approach include:

• To achieve certain objectives

For any objective, decision, or goal where you want real-time feedback to find out what’s getting in the way, what you need to do, and what currently works.

• To come up with a product strategy

To get feedback on a service or product, what’s working, and what’s not.

• To come up with a process strategy

You can use this approach to analyze feedback on both external and internal processes.

• For customer analysis

You can involve your customers by leveraging a start stop continue analysis that you use for onboarding, communications, and customer service.

• For partner analysis

Use it to get feedback from your partners on key processes, products, or go-to-marketing strategies.

• To come up with a finance strategy

You can use the exercise when you need to look for overall operating costs, internal incentive strategies, or profit margins.

Stop Start Continue Feedback Templates

Who should do this exercise?

A start stop continue exercise is a very simple technique that doesn’t require any special knowledge or equipment to complete. The method starts by pinpointing actions that you and your team members think you should do. This method differs from those where you have to develop ideas to solve issues that require solutions first, then create an action plan. For the  start stop continue technique, you will:

• Provide your team members with opportunities to review how they currently work and identify ways to improve in the future.
• Clarify issues, weigh different ideas and come to an agreement based on shared goals.
• Provide energy and momentum to your team as each item you come up with will result in behavioral changes.
• Empower your team to keep on improving their performance at work.

Because of the simplicity of this approach, it works best for

• Executive reviews
• Program reviews
• Personal performance evaluations
• All types of project teams

How to perform the start stop continue exercise?

You can perform this exercise with your team by following a few simple steps with you as the leader or facilitator:

• Create 3 columns on a template or whiteboard and label them with “Start,” “Stop,” and “Continue.”
• Ask each member of your team to spend some time writing down their answers. Do the same for the other 2 columns.
• Ask each member of your team to verbally express their ideas so you can write them down. You can also allow them to explain their ideas if they want to.
• Group all related ideas into categories as you go and eliminate the ones that aren’t in scope. As the facilitator, you can first show your team members how to perform the exercise.
• Allow each member of your team to give a set number of ideas and votes to decide which actions to implement. You may allow as many ideas and votes as you like. Just make sure that each member of the team will have the same number of opportunities.
• After the previous step, you will have a list of what to start, stop, and continue doing.
• Before you wrap up the exercise, make sure to assign an owner to each action along with a deadline to accomplish their assigned task.
• Email the template to all of your team members to keep them informed.

Start Stop Continue Examples For Boss

What to include in the template?

Conducting a start, stop, continue exercise will your team members to review the actions they have taken in the past to determine what to stop or continue. It will also make it easier for them to think of new actions to start doing. Feedback is a very important factor in understanding current performance levels while identifying ways to improve. With this framework, you and your team members can overcome the challenges of receiving and giving feedback. For this exercise, you need to include:

• Stop, which are the things that don’t work
• Start, which are the ones you aren’t currently doing, but would benefit your company
• Continue, which are the things that work

You can perform this exercise at the end of sprints or projects. Since different teams will have different processes, focus on evaluating what’s best for your team and what makes the most sense.

Using the start stop continue template

You would perform this exercise mainly to improve the performance of your team. It is a collaborative process that encourages each team member to identify activities to implement (start), cease (stop), or maintain (continue).

Gaining a thorough understanding of this approach will provide you with a way to gain valuable insight from the members of your team that could improve overall performance. Here are the steps that will guide you as you conduct the exercise using a template:

Define your goals and make sure they are very clear

Clearly explain what you want to accomplish by conducting the exercise. Include an overview of what this process entails. For instance, you could inform your team members that you want to assess how you process customer orders to find out if you need to change your approach.

Doing this will allow you to establish the parameters you need for the change. With this information, you can inform your team that your main goal is to take action. Remind them this it’s a team exercise that will allow you to come up with a consensus.

Create a template to use for the exercise

Using a worksheet or template will provide you and your team with a framework to follow during your exercise. Whether you use a downloaded template or one you have made yourself, it will help you organize the process while providing a record of the feedback you get.

Usually, start stop continue templates include 3 categories where the members of your team can input their insights and ideas. Make the template as detailed as you need it to be. For instance, if you need to analyze your approach to processing customer orders. You can apply the categories to each part of the whole process.

Agree on the best ideas

After the members of your team have finished filling out the template, collaborate on the ideas that merit further implementation or discussion. Often, many team members will have the same ideas or give similar insights. After writing the ideas down, have a brainstorming session where you decide how to implement the ideas. For instance, you can talk about areas to streamline while processing the orders of your customer. Come up with ideas to make this possible.

Implement the ideas you have agreed on

After reaching an agreement, it’s time to create an action plan. Some actions might be very easy to implement. For example, if your team determines that it isn’t necessary to have weekly meetings and daily reports, you can easily replace or reduce these actions.

There are also some cases where the action might need more complex steps. If you’re faced with such a situation, it’s recommended to create a more detailed action plan with a timeline for the implementation of each action.

The start stop continue exercise includes a classic framework that you and your team will use to identify things within a specific experience, event, or situation that you feel is either unnecessary, needed, or should stay as is. Because the process is so simple, it’s suitable for almost any kind of project.

You can also perform it as a live activity or do it asynchronously with the members of your team with minimal facilitation or preparation required. You can design a template in different ways. Since different teams have different needs, you can use any kind of template. The most important thing to think about when designing your template is to customize it for your team.