Forbes recently reported that when trust and psychological safety do not exist in an organisation, it is generally because people do not feel listened to. This is harmful for retention, productivity and innovation – not something any organisation will want.
For employees to want to leave you their feedback, the culture must be open – one where open dialogue and active listening is celebrated and also embedded in an ongoing process.
You can’t just place a feedback podium in the staff room and expect great things. If employees feel a lack of trust or are restricted in some way, this will hinder any attempts to receive or give feedback. Management really do set the scene and one of the keys to cultural change will be to open up all channels of communication – which includes feedback itself.
COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR TEAMS
We have found, communication with the teams is really important to ensure your employee feedback technology really does provide the return on investment you want. This requires more than a simple announcement that you’ll be looking for ongoing pulse feedback, but rather a series of communications that explain why, when, where, how and also how you will provide feed-back on the feedback – sometimes called ‘you said, we did’. This care to explain the reasons and purpose and also committing to give the results back to the team, will significantly enhance the programme and almost certainly further create that open-culture that’s required for a healthy workforce.
Many organisations like Experian, Specsavers and Mid Yorks Hospitals use the ViewPoint Pulse as part of their employee feedback and communications programmes. Whilst many organisations still run an annual deep-dive employee survey, pulse monitoring hour-by-hour, day-by-day is enabling team feedback that can point to potential issues even before they happen.
Our employees need to feel listened to; a key for retention, productivity and innovation.
