6 Ways to Get the Right Employee Feedback

Employers are focused on creating an employee experience that fosters high engagement, productivity, and satisfaction.

CultureAmp defines employee experience as “all that people encounter, observe or feel over the course of their employee journey at an organization.” In order to create continuity in that experience, employee feedback should be collected on an ongoing basis.

Here are ways to ensure that your organization is not only getting feedback, but also getting the right feedback.

1. Take feedback beyond the review: Annual reviews are great but if you wait to give an employee feedback until the annual review cycle a performance issue could already be festering. The same goes for an employee, if they have an issue or concern, they should feel comfortable addressing it at any time. According to a recent Betterworks study, annual reviews aren’t enough for HR teams to reach their long term business goals anyways.
2. Make sure feedback is open: Give employees an open opportunity to give feedback in the appropriate format. If you send out a survey that’s full of leading questions, it’s probably not going to give your organization truly honest answers.
3. 360 feedback is critical: Employees should give feedback to their managers as they expect to receive it. 360 feedback can sometimes be challenging so make sure you give templates and guidelines to employees to make them feel more comfortable.
4. Be transparent about feedback: Distilling cross-sections of feedback data down to meaningful conclusions about the state of your organization is important. Make employees who do provide constructive, honest feedback like they are contributing to something greater than themselves.
5. Connect feedback to business outcomes: We are all in business to do business, right? So make sure the feedback employees give is not only disseminated to the organization, but that it’s connected to your company’s bigger picture. For example, if you’re growing rapidly (great, right?) but doing a poor job on-boarding your people, that’s going to lead to slowed growth. Sharing the feedback about poor on-boarding with employees and showing ways the leadership plans to fix that issue is a way to show employees their opinions matter at the most fundamental levels of your business.
6. Don’t ask too many questions: Make giving feedback safe by not prodding to far beyond the information employees come forth with. If you push an employee to provide more specifics or more information, they may not feel safe sharing pain points in the future.

Feedback is critical in an increasingly competitive talent market for employers and this list is just the beginning. Make it a priority early in the year to brainstorm how and why your organization needs feedback and set SMART goals around achieving them as the year goes on. Where will you start? Leave us a comment.