You’ve set up your employee feedback system, have made sure it is anonymous, measures your employee experience, engagement and/or satisfaction, and are regularly collecting feedback from your workplace.
But if that feedback is not all rosy—and it rarely is, even among the world’s best workplaces—how does one go about actioning employee feedback and addressing issues within the business?
Luckily, we have a few strategies to get you started.
Free guide: The 10 Pillars Of Employee Experience
1. Review processes
A quick win can be to review processes that are causing your staff grief. By reviewing and potentially improving these pain points, you’re showing staff that you’ve listened and are acting on their feedback. The key here is communicating with your employees which processes are under review (and why) and making sure to follow up later with the results of the review (along with any changes you may be implementing).
2. Workshopping and working groups
An excellent way to involve staff in finding solutions to issues raised in your employee feedback survey is through workshops. Create a working group of employees and business leaders to discuss the issue and problem solve it together. Not only does it show you’re actively responding to feedback, but you’re also increasing staff buy-in for the solution since they’ve been involved and consulted. It’s also an excellent way to build strong relationships and trust between leadership and employees.
One of Perceptive’s Employee Monitor clients, recruitment company Salt, uses this approach to great success in all their offices around the world. You can read about it here.
3. Set feedback action goals
This is particularly useful for tackling larger issues that have been brought into focus in your employee experience survey. From developing an employee intranet or new onboarding process to implementing new technology, these are long-term actions that need to be broken down into smaller stages to succeed. These could involve research, supplier quotes, installation, testing, and any number of other steps before the solution can go ‘live’. By setting each step as a goal with a timely deadline, you can ensure that bigger employee feedback issues are addressed and not lumped in the ‘too big, too hard’ basket.
4. Make people accountable
If you’re struggling to get your business’s leadership to act on employee feedback, consider incorporating employee experience, satisfaction, or engagement metrics into their KPIs. By making such employee measures an indicator of performance, you are not only communicating the importance of workplace culture to your business but also encouraging your leaders to take action to improve employee experience and culture to meet the requirements of their position—or to receive a coveted pay raise, promotion, or bonus.
5. Run regular pulse surveys to check-in
If your organisation is undergoing significant change to address poor employee morale or workplace culture, it can be useful to run regular pulse surveys to assess whether your actions to address your workplace issues are effective. Rather than running an employee survey annually, you might opt to survey your staff every quarter or on a six-monthly basis while your business is transforming.
This approach also offers an opportunity for your employees to give regular feedback on your engagement and experience initiatives, suggest tweaks and improvements as well as new ideas to try. The major challenge with this strategy is getting your employees’ buy-in to complete the survey and be willing to provide honest and constructive feedback. If you’re a large business, surveying only a portion of your employees at a time could help lessen survey fatigue. However, if you’re successful in engaging your staff in these surveys and have your leadership respond in kind to their feedback, you will create a strong employee feedback loop that empowers your employees and makes their voice feel heard.
While these are not the only strategies for addressing employee feedback, they are a good starting point. Every business is different, and every business faces its own unique employee experience challenges. The last piece of advice we can give is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Communication is the backbone of any employee feedback programme—from sending the surveys, to reminding staff to take them, to responding, to analysing responses and creating, implementing and reviewing the actions that result. Closing the loop on employee engagement starts with keeping your staff in the loop.
Learn the 10 critical elements that attract and retain talent, build a positive workplace culture, and keep your employees engaged in our free guide: The 10 Pillars Of Employee Experience.
