Today’s workplace is full of possibilities due to changes in work styles, evolving competition, and employee profiles. Motivated, engaged, and productive employees are the key to ensuring a business thrives in today’s changing business environment.
Leadership teams aim to empower employees to perform at their best at all times, and open employee feedback has become one of the best ways to ensure this. When it comes to employee feedback strategies, this goes beyond an annual survey; it is a continuous process that helps improve employee engagement.
Great Place To Work® India’s research shows that organizations creating high-trust workplace cultures consistently outperform on the outcomes that matter most. On average, top quartile companies with caring and inspiring leadership experiences outperform by 14% on workplace outcomes. We work with companies to choose the right employee feedback strategies and help them execute it through various means, such as employee surveys, culture consulting, and leadership capability building. This article will explore the importance of employee feedback, leadership strategies for gathering it, and the challenges in establishing a continuous cycle of employee feedback.
What Does Employee Feedback Mean and Why Is It Important?
The conventional definition of employee feedback focuses on the replies employees provide during a survey. However, employee feedback goes beyond surveys and encompasses input that occurs freely and easily throughout the year. This can be through formal means, such as in-person discussions, pulse checks, surveys, and through informal means, such as town hall sessions and chats with colleagues.
Employee feedback is crucial because it reflects their comfort, commitment, and engagement with their work and the company’s progress. Employees who feel heard are more likely to consider aligning their long-term goals with the company’s. When a company enables employee feedback, they create an atmosphere of trust and fosters a culture of inclusivity, innovation, and collaboration. This isn’t just good for engagement, it directly influences business outcomes. Great Place To Work research found that organizations with stronger cultures significantly outperform others in employee retention, productivity, customer service, recruitment, and agility, highlighting why listening to employees should be treated as a strategic business priority rather than an HR exercise.
A prime example of this is our case study on ‘What makes 97% employees at IHG Hotels & Resorts endorse the brand’. Employee feedback played a pivotal role in the transformation by gathering it and acting on the input. Employee feedback is also one of the strongest indicators of trust within an organization. When leaders actively listen, communicate transparently, and respond to employee concerns, they strengthen the five dimensions of the Trust Index™ – Credibility, Respect, Fairness, Pride, and Camaraderie, which form the foundation of every Great Workplace.
The Top Strategic Approaches Leadership Can Take to Improve Employee Feedback
The success of any employee-related initiative rests on leadership endorsing it and leading the way. Here are some well-documented strategic approaches to fostering employee feedback. The strategies have been broken into three aspects: the topic for gathering employee feedback, the approach to gathering feedback, and the roadblocks the company may face during the process.
1. Compensation
Remuneration, equitable pay, job-related perks, and bonuses are sensitive topics, but they significantly affect how employees perceive the company and their position within it. Getting employee feedback on compensation requires a subtle yet firm approach to elicit candid responses. To better understand this, you must understand why and how great workplaces are embracing pay transparency as part of their employee feedback strategy.
Approach
The approach to getting employee feedback has to be at several levels.
- At a general level, the HR and finance departments can share information about the pay structure through group sessions that provide a forum for employee feedback.
- Specific department heads can lead a discussion on performance-related bonuses and seek employee feedback.
- Seek confidential feedback through an online survey to get salary-related feedback from employees annually.
- Share industry-level remuneration insights with employees and encourage them to share their own insights and seek clarification.
Roadblocks
Salary is a sensitive topic, and getting people to open up about it requires finesse. Often, people can either be overly aggressive or can veer towards being afraid to speak their mind. Leadership must endorse these employee feedback sessions with positive support.
2. Communication
Communication plays a strong role in creating an inclusive atmosphere for employees. Employees need to understand how communication and collaboration affect their work life. Our research shows that organizations with caring and inspiring leadership outperform by 14% across key workplace outcomes, including employee retention, recruitment, customer service, agility, and discretionary effort. Transparent communication and meaningful employee feedback are essential behaviours that enable this kind of leadership. To that end, there are two main aspects. One is how employees feel about leadership’s communication, and the other is how employees communicate with each other and with leadership.
Approach
For feedback and understanding of how communication works, it is crucial to establish processes for various levels.
- Start by clearly sharing the company’s mission and purpose at key moments and keep it consistent. One of the best times to share this information is during the onboarding process.
- When communicating about major decisions and changes in direction, it is best to do so in a group setting. Ensure that employees have a brief before the session and allocate time for Q&A.
- Breaking this down to goals at the departmental and individual levels is another aspect that requires feedback.
- Offer multiple channels for employees to provide feedback on how goals are communicated and on any doubts, they have about them.
Roadblocks
Employee feedback on communication about the company’s goals and direction, and on how they can interact with each other and with management, ensures commitment. But the major roadblock in this process can be that employees feel unheard and unappreciated. They often do not provide feedback because they feel no action is taken on their input.
3. Change and Agility
Companies change direction at certain points, so employees must be aware of these changes and prepare for them. When these changes are implemented without employee input, they can cause disruption. It is important to ensure that employees understand what is going on, provide feedback on the changes, and ask for support to become trained to handle them.
Organizations that actively involve employees during periods of change are also better positioned to adapt. Even our research shows that the Best Workplaces score 90% on agility, demonstrating that employees are far more willing to embrace change when they trust leadership and have opportunities to share their perspectives.
Approach
For input about change and ability, employee feedback plays a vital role in acceptance and implementation. Here’s how to approach employee feedback:
- Have the leadership discuss the upcoming changes, the decision-making process, bottlenecks, and their expectations from employees within the organization.
- Conduct surveys to understand how employees view the changes and what they need to develop the agility to adapt.
- Train team managers to lead one-on-one discussions with team members to address their questions, provide support, and empower them to work more effectively.
- Provide an anonymous forum where employees feel confident about sharing their feedback about the changes.
Roadblocks
When a company is undergoing change and employees are asked to adapt, the usual reaction is insecurity and uncertainty. In most cases, employees feel that the decisions have already been made and that providing feedback is of no avail. It is critical to consider these roadblocks and to encourage employees to provide feedback.
4. Career Progression
One of the main motivators and moving forces behind an engaged workforce is the career growth that an organization offers them. As companies grow and work styles change, career progression plans will likely need to be discussed with employees. It is also crucial that the management gets employees on board with these plans. Career progression is also intertwined with learning and development.
Continuous employee feedback also helps organizations improve development opportunities. We found that organizations consistently recognized as Best Workplaces perform significantly better in areas such as training and development opportunities, involvement in decision-making, and special employee benefits, reinforcing the importance of listening to employees as they grow within the organization.
Approach
Communication and employee feedback about career progression, goals, and learning and development needs must be shared with employees and their feedback collected.
- Share a company-wide plan for career progression and learning and development options available for employees.
- Encourage questions during this session and offer clarity on the doubts raised.
- For specific teams, ask the managers to hold personal discussions with a Human Resources department representative present to collect feedback from individuals.
- Share the training and development opportunities available to employees via email communication. Create a platform (such as an intranet portal) to encourage employee feedback.
Roadblocks
One of the main roadblocks to employee feedback is miscommunication, poor understanding, and informal discussions among employees. It is crucial to address this roadblock by providing employees with multiple channels to seek clarification and offer feedback.
5. Equitable Treatment and Favoritism
This is probably the second-most sensitive topic after remuneration. In most companies, there is either a perception or a situation in which people believe that there is favoritism. As humans, it is difficult to overcome bias, and this can adversely affect employee morale. Fairness is one of the defining characteristics of a high-trust workplace. Repeat-certified organizations consistently perform better on indicators such as managers avoiding favouritism and involving employees in decision-making, demonstrating that equitable treatment improves when organizations continuously seek and act on employee feedback. It is important to get employee feedback to ensure that the effects of favoritism are minimized. When organizations approach this subject, they realize the role of leadership in creating a great workplace.
Approach
The starting point would be to understand how managers operate and this can be done by analyzing trends, recognizing exceptions, and training managers. And feedback must be taken on a subtler and nuanced approach. This includes:
- Ask teams to evaluate their managers through an anonymous survey where they can evaluate them on various factors.
- Look at complaints received about bias or favoritism and interview the complainant and their teammates to understand the factors at work.
- Have informal chats to get the pulse of the employees and understand the dynamics occurring in the team.
- Offer a helpline where employees can approach their skip manager (immediate supervisor’s manager) to talk about their concerns.
Roadblocks
The major roadblock for collecting employee feedback about favoritism and fair play at work is the fear of repercussions, and people may not speak freely. It is difficult to work under a leader who shows favoritism and more of than not, employees would rather quit the job than bring up their concerns.
6. Health and Wellbeing
The mental, emotional, physical health and wellbeing of employees directly impacts the organization at various levels including productivity, employee retention, public image, and stakeholder management. Employee feedback also helps organizations identify early signs of burnout. According to Great Place To Work research, employees at Great Workplaces are significantly less likely to experience burnout than those at average workplaces, reinforcing the importance of regularly listening to employees about their wellbeing.
Businesses today acknowledge the importance of ensuring that employees are healthy and to do this, it is crucial to understand what factors to address. Collecting regular employee feedback about health and wellbeing provides the right direction as expectations keep changing.
Approach
To get the right feedback on this aspect, employers must start with an assessment of the current state and determine what changes must be made to improve the status quo. However, collecting employee feedback about this topic is straightforward and easier as compared to others. The company can:
- Run a group session to get candid feedback from employees in an open forum.
- Ask employees team-wise to understand the underlying factors that affect them.
- Seek input from employees on steps to improve health and well-being at various levels.
Roadblocks
The roadblocks to collecting employee feedback about health and wellbeing can be simpler than others but can still pose a challenge. Generally speaking, employees are more likely to be open about their opinions, they may veer towards absurd suggestions that the organization may not be able to meet. It is critical to set realistic expectations when collecting employee feedback about this topic.
Steps to Ensure Genuine and Candid Employee Feedback
In today’s competitive corporate world, companies are aware of the importance of collecting employee feedback and they use various means to collect the genuine feedback. However, many times, employees may not feel comfortable providing genuine input or feel disinterested. Here are some steps to ensure genuine feedback:
- Select the right timing of the feedback session to get genuine inputs
- Always offer anonymity when the information collected is sensitive
- Do not overdo the feedback collection sessions to keep the interest going
- Set the ground rules for providing feedback and provide context for the feedback session
- Showcase leadership interest, engagement, and participation in employee feedback drives
- Strategically select the target audience to collect feedback to improve its efficacy
- After the information is collected, share the findings, insights, and next steps
Organizations that consistently act on employee feedback create stronger workplace cultures over time. Great Place To Work research shows that organizations certified for five or more consecutive years demonstrate statistically stronger workplace cultures than newly certified organizations, highlighting the value of treating employee feedback as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time initiative.
Keep the Momentum of Employee Feedback Going
Employee feedback is an essential moving force to keep the workforce engaged, motivated, and productive. Employee feedback is much more than an engagement initiative, it is a strategic driver of business performance. Organizations with caring and inspiring leadership outperform by 14% across key workplace outcomes, while India’s Best Workplaces achieve 89% employee retention, 90% employee advocacy, and nearly 2X higher revenue per employee than the average Nifty 500 company. Organizations that actively listen to employees, act on feedback, and build trust don’t just create better workplaces, they create stronger businesses.
To be effective, employee feedback needs to beyond annual surveys or quarterly townhall sessions. The approach to employee feedback must be based on the topic for which the company is collecting feedback and action points must be shared to be more effective. Want help on getting started? This is where our team at Great Place To Work can help. Whether it is conducting impartial employee surveys or providing culture consulting services, we offer tailored solutions.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is best strategy to collect genuine employee feedback?
The best strategy for collecting employee feedback will depend on the topic for which the company is collecting information. It is critical to tailor the strategy to the type of feedback and the kind of audience the company is working with. There may be no single strategy to collect feedback but rather some strategic approaches that will make the process more efficient.
How to get the right responses from employees?
Determine why the information is being collected, what it will be useful for, then decide on the collection method, and start the process. While approaching employees, set the context, explain the next steps, and assure them of complete confidentiality before starting the process. Once the information has been collected, analyze the information, share the findings, and define the way forward.
What role does leadership play in the process of collecting employee feedback?
Leadership plays a pivotal role in employee feedback collection by showing support, demonstrating their faith in the process, and explaining the need for the feedback. Leadership endorsement ensures that employees see the process as valuable and will step forward to participate in the process.
When is the right time to collect employee feedback?
The right time to collect feedback depends on the type of input the company is seeking and the channel through which they plan to collect the information. It is crucial to ensure that process of feedback collection does not disrupt operations or disturb the work life of employees.
