Giving feedback in the workplace is commonplace, mainly focused on you, the employer, giving them, your employees, feedback on their performance. But what about what the employees want you to know? Who captures that? I mean the feedback that isn’t necessarily ‘role’ related, but feedback on the wider workplace environment and culture in which employees’ function. It is just as important; and the insight you can gain can have a huge effect on both an individual’s and a business’ overall performance.
Benefits of effective employee feedback
Employee well-being is high on most businesses’ agenda right now (a global pandemic is all it took!), so allow us to focus on the individual’s benefit for now. A structured employee voice program, that includes unrestricted and open feedback, will result in employees feeling safer, happier, empowered, connected, and cared for.
- They feel safer.
- Employees see more, consume more, and can see where the dangers lie. If they can feed this back regularly issues can be attended to quickly.
- Makes for a happier environment
- When employees feel safer, they can relax and focus on the task at hand.
- They feel empowered to change things
- Staff know they can affect what is happening around them which makes them feel more in control of their surroundings.
- Builds team empathy
- Employees see the issues that affect peers, too, which will make them feel less alone or simply make them more aware of the people around them.
- That feeling they get from knowing their employer cares about them.
- This makes a positive relationship, builds trust and in turn results in greater loyalty, creates teams that go the extra mile, and improves outputs. Read about creating an employee feedback culture
And it’s not just the employees that benefit.
Organizations that ask for feedback find that their employees offer ideas that are rarely captured in a board room, which when used for improvement creates a positive impact on the whole business. A structured feedback process builds a valid list of internal concerns, that can be acted and reported upon. Managers can then monitor the effects of improvements to see if they are working. Data will evidence just how far you have come, and see where is left to go.
But also, think of the biggest investment most companies will make… its people! Absenteeism, long-term sickness, staff churn, recruitment, employment tribunals, or simply low productivity due to working environments… they all have very real (and often substantial) costs associated with them. Read more about The Pulse of Employee engagement: can you afford not to take it.
Whether an employee feedback solution is providing you with a continuous stream of trend data or helping to isolate specific workplace issues for individual cases, the positive impact of the solution as an early warning system is very tangible.
How to get regular timely feedback from employees
Annual staff surveys are traditional – but they just don’t produce the right level of timely, actionable data. Regular pulse surveys are therefore preferred.
ViewPoint’s feedback solutions manage these pulse surveys and collate results in a live dashboard – so you know within minutes if a problem occurs. Feedback podiums, such as the ViewPoint Pulse , are popular in all types of workplaces are they are universally accessible, look smart, grab attention, and can be used at any time. Data from feedback podiums, or kiosks, is directly fed into online dashboards. This means that you get all the data you need without the burden of data input.
