Intro
Employee feedback is crucial for every organization no matter your industry. Your frontline employees possess valuable customer insights, and your back-end team ensures everything runs smoothly. Encouraging employee feedback through channels other than meetings and emails is essential for gathering the latest information quickly and effectively.
Employees know what’s happening with customers and clients because they’re on the front lines—they have all the information.
It’s in the company’s best interest to listen to what employees have to say. With that in mind, let’s explore a few more reasons why employee feedback matters and how you can encourage it in the workplace.
Why employee feedback matters
4 ways how you can encourage employee feedback
Your company is only as good as its employees. Facilitating communication and creating channels to gather their opinions, sentiments, and questions can lead to better business decisions and improve your bottom line. On top of that, fostering an environment that encourages feedback will also positively affect:
- Goal Setting: You will achieve better results if you approach goal-setting as a two-way street, co-creating goals with your employees. This way, employees can achieve their personal (professional) goals alongside company objectives—a win-win situation.
- Accountability: When employees know they have a voice and will be heard, they contribute more to the company. They gain accountability not only for their actions but also for the team and the organization as a whole because they realize it’s a two-way street and that their opinion (feedback) matters.
- Course-Correction: Plans and strategies often change when confronted with reality. Therefore, it’s essential to have a mechanism that alerts you when adjustments are needed. Employee feedback is the perfect mechanism for making small course corrections to help you achieve your company objectives.
Using an intranet
The first way to encourage employee feedback is by ensuring you have a platform for it. An intranet is a perfect platform.
With an intranet, specifically Intranet Connections’ intranet, you can provide comments, push communications, quick polls and surveys, bulletins, and more. These tools help encourage your employees to provide feedback and create a two-way communication channel within your organization.
1st United Credit Union lacked feedback channels for employees to send anonymous feedback. Together, we helped them create a tool using our suggestion box app where employees could submit their anonymous feedback on the intranet.
Creating a safe space
Employee feedback isn’t just a technical issue; it’s a cultural one. Employees need to feel comfortable giving both positive and negative feedback to peers, subordinates, and managers about their decisions, the organization, or clients.
It can be difficult for everyone to speak their mind in the workplace, especially if their input is constructive or not explicitly positive. Creating a space where your team knows they will not be punished, regardless of their input, is essential. This helps facilitate honest feedback rather than creating a culture of “yes” men.
1-on-1 meetings
1-on-1 meetings are fundamental to achieving two-way communication with your employees. While this might seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many organizations haven’t adopted routine 1:1s.
Creating dedicated time for your employees to connect with their supervisor to discuss progress on projects, goals, current challenges, and other feedback naturally facilitates better communication.
Teaching people how to give/receive feedback
Mechanisms such as the intranet and one-on-one meetings are the “what,” but people still need to learn the “how.” That’s why you need to invest in teaching people how to give and receive feedback.
While one of the most commonly referenced methods is the Sandwich Method—criticism sandwiched between two compliments—there are other options.
One of the best methods for giving feedback is the BIO method.
BIO stands for Behavior, Impact, Option.
- Behavior: What has objectively happened (e.g., Mary missed the deadline on the project submission).
- Impact: How that event impacted you/the organization (e.g., This made me question Mary’s time management and prioritization).
- Option: What can be done differently next time to prevent this (e.g., Next time, you should start the project earlier or delegate the task to someone else if you can’t meet the deadline).
This is what that could look like:
“Hey Mary, I noticed you missed the deadline on the project submission. I’m just wondering what happened here; usually, you’re on track with these things. If you’re falling behind, remember it’s okay to reach out for help, or we can work together to re-prioritize tasks.”
Conclusion
Employee feedback is essential in today’s workplace. If you want to achieve your company objectives, you need to be able to pivot your plans quickly, and the best way to do so is by listening to your employees on the front lines—they have the information.
But if you’re still having trouble getting your team to talk to you, check out our free webinar with Southside Bank here
