Is gathering employee feedback a pointless exercise?
Under pressure to deliver, it can be too easy to fall into treating employee feedback systems as a token effort. It demonstrates that the company is listening, and listening is enough, right?
Industry-standard tool Peakon’s own sales pitch uses the phrase ‘Understand engagement, boost productivity.’ It’s a compelling message, but delivering on that promise takes commitment from leaders, requires a healthy dose of humility, and most importantly it requires follow through and consistency.
Having seen the problems the wrong approach can cause (both as a leader and a team member), I’ve collected what I think are the key things you can do to make feedback impactful.
It takes all three.
Ask the right questions.
Think carefully about what really matters to your teams. If you’re asking how well they understand the corporate strategy, have you made the effort to translate that strategy into meaningful guidance and KPIs for employees at different levels?
If you have teams with very different job roles, skill levels and cultures, don’t ask the same questions to everyone. Things like autonomy and reward mean very different things to your sales force than they do to your engineers or your facilities team.
Take criticism on the chin.
Don’t ask questions that you don’t want the answers to. My message to my teams has always been ‘feedback is a gift’. If there’s an area in which they can do better, they need to know. The same goes for leaders. Your job is to support the team. They’re entitled to let you know where you can do better.
Respect the anonymity.
Tempting as it might be to speculate on who has left a specific comment, this is one whodunnit you shouldn’t waste energy on. Attributing negative feedback to someone you know is disgruntled or even on notice misses the point. Either the feedback is meaningful and actionable, or it isn’t. By all means, use the options available to you through your feedback system to request more information and acknowledge the feedback, but if they wish to remain anonymous, it’s up to you to reflect as objectively as you can on their comments.
Take the right actions.
The ‘act’ stage of the process is the most impactful. Take the time to identify the most impactful changes you can make based on the feedback you receive. If the team perceives that you’re rearranging the chairs on the deck when they’re constantly drawing your attention to icebergs, they’ll lose faith in the process, and you’ll see the engagement drop off a cliff.
Feedback to your teams.
Give your teams the credit. If you’re making a change based on their feedback, make this clear and make it timely. In the past I’ve made the mistake of saving up all of the messaging around the link between feedback and action and delivering it all at once. It came across as a lecture in response to falling engagement, and rightly so.
Expect and embrace a variety of views.
Make sure you’ve had the impacts you expected.
“Listen, Act, and Analyse” is a cycle. You have to give sufficient focus to analyzing changes made to ensure that you’re fully delivering on the team’s needs. Also, be direct. You can ask for feedback outside of the anonymous process and dive deeper into specific topics that come up often.
Look for trends, not just scores.
I’m going to admit that in the past, I have hugely misjudged my approach with my teams, and the feedback reflected this pretty clearly. By reflecting and changing course, I was able to make back the ground that was lost and more. Taking personal accountability for those mistakes increased trust. This resulted in team satisfaction scores that consistently outperformed both company and industry benchmarks. It would be easy to see this as mission complete, but far from it. Unless you focus on rolling trends, you won’t know when key areas could be at risk of regressing.
You definitely don’t want to be in the red.
